Sometimes I don’t like being married.
Gah! What did she say?
Don’t get me wrong. I love my husband Kris. I’m still goo-goo-gah-gah over that cute, disorganized mess of a man. But the ooey gooey part of loving someone doesn’t exactly mean the being-married part is always fun, easy, pretty or enjoyable. In fact, many times it is downright confusing, difficult and super challenging!
Yes, I see the beauty in the tough times and am grateful for what they have taught me, blah, blah blah. But can we please for just a few moments here, stop sanitizing our lives into a silicone image of perfection? I mean, seriously.
Can I still be wildly committed to my husband and at the very same time admit the severe frustration I sometimes feel within our marriage?
Does this automatically mean our marriage is headed for the wood-chipper?
Listen, if you are trying your best to hold the shredded pieces of your life, marriage and/or relationship together, welcome to the crowd. But if you’re white-knuckling the dickens out of said relationship to hold it together, please stop. Relax. Take a deep breath and read on.
See, I believe there’s a reason we do this. Ok, there are probably lots of reasons, some of which are deep seated and frankly, too far above my pay grade to pretend to understand here. But what I will offer is my own experience on understanding good and perfection and hopefully this perspective will help. How you view ‘good’ and ‘perfect’ profoundly impacts your overall view of the world and your own life.
The idea of perfection is subjective. By definition, perfection means the condition, state, or quality of being free or as free as possible from all flaws or defects.
But perfection is truly in the eye of the beholder. For example, if a designer creates a website and I love it, I might say, “That website is perfection”. Meaning, I wouldn’t change a thing. But to someone else, maybe they would see all sorts of improvements needed. Perfect is subjective.
I actually believe this is the healthiest use of the word perfect. But we tend to warp the idea of perfection into something else. Unfortunately, we take something subjective and try to make it objective. We create a level of flawlessness to attain to based on lots of outside factors and are continually disappointed, disenchanted and disconnected. Our thoughts around our lack of perfection drive outlandish reactions to really normal stuff. Like believing an argument with our spouse equals divorce court.
I believe this distorted view of perfection causes unnecessary suffering in our lives.
In Genesis I, there is a beautiful poem, the poem of creation. Seven times the author uses the Hebrew word tov to describe creation. Tov means good, beautiful, working the way it was created. Good. God called it all good. Night, day, water, land, trees, animals, bugs and us. It was all good. Not perfect.
We assume all of this creation was created to work perfectly. Nowhere does it say this. It simply says it is good.
Interestingly enough, all this good stuff was supposed to then go make more good stuff. Do you know what it takes for a tree to reproduce itself? It takes a seed dying. And all of this…tov. All of this…good. All of this life, in order to take place, death must occur. The death of winter gives way to the life of spring. And so on.
Tov seems focused on all that is involved in life, not the parts we tend to describe as perfect or ideal. We get the idea of perfection from others but God didn’t say creation was perfect. He said it was good.
I think we have confused the two.
So when you look at your life, your relationships, your bank account and maybe even your job…is it perfect? Is it ideal? Maybe not. But it is all a part of the good. Our problem is we are focused on the ideal and when our lives and world do not live up to this ideal we feel a tension. We’re using the wrong measuring stick and causing ourselves all sorts of pain.
So embrace the good and all that is entailed with it. The dark, the light, the change, the death and the rebirth.
It’s all good.
And for goodness sake, give your marriage a break. You’re doing just fine.
