Day 11.

Un-con-di-tion-al

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, this word means: not conditional or limited: absolute, unqualified.  

I have spent two days now, trying to figure out how to prove my un-con-di-tion-al love to my husband.  I’ve got nothin’!  In order to get closer to an answer I’ve had to ask myself what this word meant to me.  This is what I’ve found.

I have an eight-teen month old toddler who is a handful!  Before I ever met her while I was still pregnant, I understood this word completely.  My love for her was absolutely, irrevocably, unconditional.  That has not changed a bit.  She has head-butted me in the nose.  bit me, hit me, thrown temper tantrums in which I have an entire store of people staring me down.  Deprived me of sleep.  Thrown up on me, and pooped on me.  No matter what this little girl does, there is not ONE thing that could ever remove my love for her.  When she gives me kisses and hugs it sends an electric shock through my body.  When she calls me Mama, emotion courses through my soul. Every little thing she does, I find myself constantly amused.  My love for her always growing deeper, and over and over again I put my needs last, and hers first.  Always. I don’t care if she tore the heart right out of my chest, as I was dying I would be hurt but my love for her would still be the strongest thing I have ever felt.

Should the love for my husband not be the same?  Perhaps it is.  Though I don’t feel the warm fuzzy feelings all the time.  There have been times in the past four and a half years that I feel have proven that our love for one another is unconditional.  There have been times it’s felt like he’s ripped my heart right out of my chest, and he has felt the same.  We’ve put each other through so many hurtful things yet we continuously keep returning to each other.  Maybe we’re just stupid, but to me, that’s love!  There were many times I swore up and down I hated him, but though I tried to walk away, my heart always found it’s way back to his and vise versa. For this reason we stood before a judge, and in front of witnesses we vowed to never again allow anything or anyone between us until death do we part.  

For todays dare, day eleven.  We were to do something out of the ordinary to prove that our love for one another was based on our choice and nothing else.  We had crayon and marker all over our walls from a little miss someone.  My husband was going to paint over it.  Instead I ran to the store and picked up some cleaner and spent a good hour scrubbing the walls down.  When he came home, he was so pleased.  It felt good to me.  For the past two days he’s done nice things for me, yesterday he made me breakfast, and this morning before he woke me up he had coffee already made up for me!  Too sweet.  These two things aren’t really out of the ordinary.  As of late I keep finding him doing nice things for me.  Though he said they weren’t what he planned on doing for the dare, I still count them.  He’s making choices which affect me in a positive way, so why not?  

I don’t want to make this too long, so I’ll close in saying.  Marriage is hard, I understand how easy it is for people to give up.  It’s not easy to do work, especially when it seems everything in life IS work.  Jobs, house chores, raising children.  Where is the rest?  I’m starting to learn it’s in the in betweens, then finally at the end.  Through God alone have I been able to find peace in this life, but it has always come most when I do the work.  I’m starting to find more peace in my marriage as we move forward.  Last night after my hubby got home I was able to truly enjoy his company.  I’ve realized that this is more often the case than not, I just choose to see the times when I do not enjoy having him around.  I’m starting to believe that perhaps living in the present is a better option.  I’ve found that I tend to come up with ideas of how I think he’ll react to different situations and I find myself getting bitter.  Today, I’m going to give it a try, to stop the negative thoughts as they come and to look forward to our next dare with enthusiasm.  Perhaps I’ll take another go at writing a list of expectations I hold and burning it.  We’ll see...

Tomorrows dare: Love Cherishes!

The Love Dare, days 1-11

We started with day one.  We tried to not say anything negative to each other, we succeeded for this day.

Day two, we again tried to say nothing negative to each other and we performed one unexpected gesture of kindness towards the other.  We succeeded,  we spent the day thinking about how we could each please our spouse, and not what our spouse could be doing differently to please us.  This was a good day.

 Day three, we spent about 4 days on.  We were to buy something for our spouse to show that we were invested in them.  I bought my husband a toothbrush holder and his own tube of toothpaste for the shower because I had heard him say that he wanted one, and I was always taking the toothpaste out.  He bought me a beautiful cross with the serenity prayer on it, my faith is very important to me and he knows this.  This dare was great, it showed us each that we knew each other just a little bit better than we thought.  What hope this brought.

 Day four, we were to contact the other during the work day just to see how they were doing and to ask if there was anything that we could do for the other.  We did.  This dare showed us that each of us were willing to be there for the other, and we again stopped thinking so much about what our spouse could do for us to make us feel good and made a choice to think of the other unselfishly.  This did not remove our selfishness though.  This didn't remove any of our character defects, but we started to learn that "love" was not based on how we felt, love was an action, a choice.  On our wedding day, our marriage commissioner recited I Corinthians 13: 4-13.  We did not ask him to, he did not know that this was one of my favorite verses and he did not know that we had any interest in faith, he took a leap, for all he knew we could have been the biggest atheists ever and hated every word of the Bible.  I was so grateful that he took this leap, it reminded me that the commitment that I was making was not to my husband, but to God and God alone, for I would only answer to Him. But what I didn't know at the time was that it would be one of the biggest learning experiences I could have in my life related to "love."

On to day five, we were to ask our spouse to tell us three things about us that irritated them, we were not allowed to make excuses, or to try justifying our reasons for doing these irritating things.  We were to listen, then we were to think about how we could improve in these areas, we were not to focus on how much our spouse irritated us, we were to only think on how we could stop irritating them.  Ouch!

The next day, day six, we were to make a conscious effort to react to tough circumstances in our marriage with love instead of with irritation.  We did not succeed at this one, we ended up having a small spat over something silly and we ended up skipping the love dare for a few days until another silly spat pushed us to do more WORK.

In anger I moved onto day 7.  I wrote down two lists, one of positive attributes of my spouse and one of negative attributes.  It was so easy to write down all the negative things about him.  I felt negatively towards him.  I was angry that he wasn't living up to my expectations of what a loving husband should be, in fact it was so hard for me to feel anything about the list of positive things that the last one that I wrote was "he's trying." I had to thank him for something on the positive list.  I thanked him for being a good and loving father to our daughter.  I didn't even write that he was a good husband. This showed me something.  I was ugly, ugly on the inside, I married a good man!  He provided for his family and he was doing the best he could with the resources he had and I was ungrateful!!  I didn't feel that way as I wrote these things, I realized it in the next dare.

Day 8.  Take the list of negative attributes... and BURN IT!  WHAT?!  How could that be what it said?! I read it again.  BURN IT.  I found tears in my eyes as I realized I didn't want to let go of my anger, I didn't want to not be resentful, the things I felt were legitimate.  Weren't they?  maybe, but what marriage can stand on anything other than love that is not blinded by all of the me, me, me's?  I went into the bathroom held my paper above the toilet and flicked my bic.  I felt a slight sense of letting go, I felt a little better.  It didn't fix me, I'm still selfish, but I am becoming much more aware of this fact and with this knowledge I can learn not to act on it.  which brings me to day nine.

Day nine.  Love is not jealous.  I know jealousy, fortunately this was one thing that had not crept into our marriage yet so I have little to say on this matter.  We both have always been able to congratulate the other for accomplishments we've made and been able to truly be happy for the other.

On to day ten.  We were to greet each other with love and enthusiasm.  We have always said hello with a kiss at the end of a long day, we have always said the words "I love you" before heading to bed.  These things were routine for us, we weren't really that happy to see each other, we saw each other every day, nothing new, right?  I started this dare first.  I gave my husband a big kiss and told him how happy I was to see him.  When he started this dare the next day he confided he was a little confused about why I had been acting so weird.  He now understood and started to greet me at different parts of the day with loving hugs and kisses and I have to say although this seemed like such an insignificant detail, I felt more intimacy between us and I plan to continue with our enthusiastic greetings.

Day eleven.  This is where we are today.  We are to do something out of the ordinary for our spouse that proves to them and to ourselves that our love for one another is based on choice and nothing else.  This seems like it should be easy, but I'm afraid it will not be.  I have improved on cleaning, and greeting my hubby with affection, I have bought him something just to show I'm thinking about him and I have learned to keep my mouth shut when I am irritated.  So what can I do to prove my love for him is unconditional?  We will see.  I will let you know at the end of this dare what I decided on and I will let you know what he did for me.

Throughout this journey which isn't close to being finished I have learned so many things about "love" I have learned that love is not a feeling at all times.  It is not the smile on the faces of two people when they say the words "I do." It is not the love in the movies, so passionate that you just want to run through a field full of flowers into the others arms and then read each other poems while you sit by a fire late at night.  At times, love is not even a feeling.  It is a choice, a choice to see and to live the words in spite of feelings...
Love is patient, Love is kind, it does not envy it does not boast, it is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self seeking, it is not easily angered.  It keeps no record of wrong (burn it).  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

I have found that the heart is deceitful.  To follow it is to fail.  "Love" that I have struggled all my life to find was not my ideal, it was and is now a choice.  I am confident that through the next 29 days, more will be revealed.  I am learning to be the wife that God intended ME to be, I don't have to be concerned with whether or not my husband measures up to an idealistic expectation which is truly unrealistic, I am learning that although I cannot change my feelings I can change my actions, and with doing so I believe that as my views change so will my feelings.  They are already beginning to.  And with the help of God I will have a whole new meaning of love to share with my spouse and my children through my actions.  I am learning that to look at my flaws in depth I am able to look over my husbands more easily.  I am flawed in so many ways, I am human.  My husband is human and I LOVE him, no quotations needed I LOVE him!  Not because he is attractive, not because he is responsible and kindhearted, confident and supportive and thoughtful or because he tries and is a wonderful father to our child, but because he is my husband, the man I said for better OR for worse to, the man God has instructed me to submit to even when it's not comfortable.  I am his wife and it is my DUTY to love him.  Unconditionally, without expectations, without negativity.  Dear Husband, I LOVE YOU, for all that you are, all that you aren't and for all that you will or will not be.

Learning to love in the middle of a marriage

Love.  What is it?  I spent so much of my life trying to find it.  I knew my parents loved me, I was told God loved me, but I felt void throughout my teenage years and young adult life.  I looked to movies to give me an ideal. I looked at people I knew and their relationships.  I was always trying to find what everyone seemed to have.  Why didn't I feel as happy as they seemed on the surface?  The story of all of the times I tried to find "love" and failed will have to wait till another time.

I met my husband when I was 18.  I was running from a life of failed attempts at filling voids, I was broken and he offered me hope of true love, what I craved.  We started out in a whirlwind, I was crazy and lost, he was lost.  We had a roller coaster of a relationship for 2 1/2 years until it turned into an erupting volcano.  We were breaking up, getting back together, arousing jealousy and suspicion and bitterness at every turn, we couldn't figure out how to stop it.  He left me with good reason, and in the heat of a passionately hateful moment we made a baby.  That baby changed our lives forever, through her I found the meaning of true love and because of her I sought out to find God, who to me, is love (these are other stories).  We separated for a year. Six months of which he was deployed, the other six were his choice.  That statement in no way is to lay blame, it is what it is, and it was the best thing that ever could have happened.  When he came back, we got married. We were happy.  The past was exactly where it should be.   My dream of true love had finally come true.  We had two cars, and a beautiful baby, all we were missing was our picket fence, but that didn't matter, I had LOVE!  Two months into our marriage, my husband was sent on another six month deployment and this is where the story leaves off at present day (just about).

Hubby came home.  The honeymoon period was wonderful.  We could finally put our lives back together and hit the play button on life's dvd player.  Then the honeymoon period came to an end and we were left realizing that over the past year and a half, minus 2 months we had learned to live without each others company.  We had found new hobbies, made new friends, learned new life lesson. Without each other.  This was painful, we didn't know how to live in the same house.  I didn't clean enough, he played too many videogames, and on top of it he had to work ALL the time.  There was no time for rebuilding, no time to get to know each other again.  I started getting really resentful but I pushed it down as deep as it would go, and thought that if I kept pushing forward, somewhere along the way something would just "click."  It didn't.

After ignoring it for about two months, I was up late after putting the baby to bed, as usual.  I thought of where we had come from, where we were and tried to look to the future to see where we were going.  I couldn't see, all I could see is that we were far from okay, we didn't talk about important things, we had swept them all under a rug.  When we did talk about anything worth while, it was about our daughter.  She was our only common interest.  I could not see us having a functional marriage at this point. I stayed up until he came home from work at 3 in the morning and we talked until about 5am.  I told him the truth, I told him that I felt nothing, that I couldn't see us happy five years from now and that if we didn't do something, anything, soon, I wasn't sure we would make it.  He was broken, as was I.  He suggested counseling.  I said "no."  I held a resentment towards marriage counselors, I had never seen them do any good for anyone.  I looked at them with contempt, they sat in their comfy chairs, with their pen and pad and said things like "how do you feel about that?"  and "why not try some deep breathing?"  This is another story though.

I posted a question on a forum for military wives and asked if anyone else had been through what we were going through and I needed to know what worked for them to restore their relationship.  My first gleam of hope was hearing I wasn't the only one.  We weren't the only couple who had spent so much time apart and didn't know each other anymore.  One woman told me that her and her husband had done the "Love Dare" a book filled with forty days of dares to teach you how to save your marriage or strengthen it, if it wasn't broken.  I slacked, but after another argument the feeling of emptiness returned and I commenced to buy the book and asked my husband to participate with me.  He was more than willing.

In the next blog I will be starting with day one and continuing on to eleven.  I did not start this blog when we started the love dare so I have making up to do.  I apologize, after the next, none of the entries will be as long.  I hope you enjoy.