Fiddler On The Roof

Have you ever seen The Fiddler on the Roof? There is a scene in the movie that has really been making me think a lot lately. 

Pondering the announcement by their daughter that she is in love, the husband and wife get into a discussion about their arranged marriage.  The husband begins to ask "Do you love me?" The wife asks "After 25 years, why talk about love right now?"  She goes into a list of all she has done with and for him and then questions herself "Do I love you?"

I think my favorite part is where she says "Do I love you?  I'm your wife!" and he responds with "Yes, but do you love me?"  After determining that they do in fact love one another, they end the scene with "It doesn't change a thing, but even so, after 25 years it's nice to know."

I have found myself pondering this scene for many reasons lately.  The first is the idea of arranged marriages and "learning" to love your spouse.  As a child I never understood how arranged marriages could work.  How could they ever be happy?  Didn't one need to fall in love and get all goosebumpy for a marriage to work?  As an adult with 6 kids, I'm liking arranged marriages more and more. 

But it's not so much the idea of someone else choosing your spouse for you that has recently been intriguing me.  It is the idea of choosing to love the one to whom you are married.  Perhaps you are thinking, "shouldn't you already love the one to whom you are married?"  Perhaps.  However, with the rate of divorce as it is, perhaps we need to redefine this idea of loving your spouse. 

I know that there are married people who either don't love their spouse or, like the wife in this movie, question whether or not they do love their spouse.  If that is you, take heart.  There is hope.  If you don't love your spouse, or don't know if you do, here is a simple plan to help you.  Ready?  Okay.  Love your spouse. 

See?  Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

What?  Not good enough?  Okay, how about this.  You have likely heard "love is a verb not a feeling" blah, blah, blah.  Well the good news is it can be both.

You know those crazy people that actually like exercise?  Why do they like it?  Because at some time, they forced themselves to get up and do it.  They forced the mechanics, made themselves run, walk, zumba, whatever.  And on the days they were tired, they got up and exercised anyway.  Soon, they discovered that they actually felt better after they exercised. They began to see that on days when they didn't exercise they felt yucky.  At some point the mechanical act of forcing the behaviour of exercising rolled into an actual emotional and attitudinal change toward exercise. 

Love is like that.  Force yourself act in loving ways.  Each day think of one thing that would be nice for your spouse and do that one thing. It doesn't have to be earth shattering.  You may be surprised to find what small things it actually will take to show your spouse that you love him or her.

Early in our marriage, if I didn't have to work, I stayed in bed while my husband got up for work.  He went to work and ate instant oatmeal at his desk.  He ate PB & J at his desk for lunch, and if he was really lucky got to take me out for dinner.  At some time I decided it would be nice to fix him breakfast.  Now I get up (something I hate) and make breakfast for my husband.  I pack his lunch, make his coffee and (usually, barring nasty weather) walk him to his car.  If he's really lucky, he still gets to take me out for dinner.  This little thing has changed our marriage.  It shows love to him while allowing us a little alone time.

I don't tell you this to brag.  On the contrary,  I'm a miserable failure in dozens of other ways, but the fact that I make him a priority sort of hides some of my faults.  He doesn't go out of his way to find things I'm doing wrong.  The mechanical discipline of getting up to show love to my husband by making breakfast and lunch has become an emotional connection for us.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to ask my spouse in 25 years "Do you love me?"  I definitely don't want him to ever have to ask me "Do you love me?"

On Guarding Your Heart

I grew up on country music. There is a certain quality to country music that has always spoken directly to my heart. As with anything, there is good and bad to listening to country music. It certainly didn't have the type of "profanity" and amoral content you might hear in some other styles (though I grant there is some). Yet I found, years later, one important way that it affected my heart, a way in which I was not expecting, nor was I ready for. Young girls especially, take heed, it isn't just music. You can be setting yourself up for problems without ever knowing it.

Here is my story. I am married to an amazing man. Now, after 15 years (nearly) of marriage and nearly 20 years together, I am loved and adored beyond my dreams. But this has not always been so. When my husband and I first married, we were happy. Of course, we didn't know any better, but we were happy. We bickered and argued, but who doesn't? We were in love. Of course, I knew what love was, I listened to all the great songs on love, country music. Country singers are the experts on love, or so it seems. I heard all the songs singing about how he couldn't live without her, she was the most beautiful creature in the world, he would walk to the ends of the Earth for her. And there begins my problem.

After 3 or 4 years of marriage, I didn't feel like I was being loved like this. Don't misunderstand. I married a faithful, kind, honest man who would never mistreat me or behave in any way that was less than ethical. Yet I was certain he was not as deeply in love with me as all these songs implied he should be. I wanted him to be gaga for me, but I didn't realize I had a part to play in this. I needed to behave in a lovable way.

I am not saying I was the worst wife in the world and he was miserable. Far from it. I was a mediocre wife, he was a mediocre husband, we had a mediocre kind of marriage (from my viewpoint). Once I became convicted that the only way I could make any changes in my marriage was to change my behavior, I saw real improvement quickly.

I began to try to treat my husband like he was the king (ok, that was my goal, I may have fallen short some). I wanted him to feel special and adored, the way I wanted to feel but didn't. I don't know how long it took, but 10 years later if feels like it was overnight that he began to reciprocate and began to see me differently.

Here I am, a decade later, more in love than the day we married. I truly know what it is like to be adored like the women in the country songs that I rarely listen to anymore. But I regret the years that I spent longing for what my heart misunderstood due to the influence of the music I listened to. I let my heart be affected to the point where, had God not intervened, my marriage would have been eaten away until we were no longer two mediocre spouses in a mediocre marriage, but two selfish people unable to make even a mediocre marriage work.

I am grateful God stepped in, showed me how to make my marriage what I longed for. I am grateful that God stepped in before I did lasting damage to my marriage and to the amazing man He gave me. Now as I am endeavoring to raise godly children, I think more about the influences in their lives, not just bad language or bad messages, but the heart of the matter.

I encourage all you young girls, or even married women who have issues in their marriages that are making them unhappy, search your heart for expectations that may not be from God. Ask Him to teach you to make your spouse (current or future) happy, not to show your spouse how to make you happy. Don't let "romantic" notions in your heart set you up for unrealistic expectations. Instead, let God's design for marriage, a relationship filled with servanthood and love, lead you to the best God has for you.

Happily Ever After

Today's topic, marriage. What qualifies me to write about marriage? Well, nothing. I am married. But then so are millions of others in this world. I am happily married. I wish I could say the same for all the millions of married people in the world, but unfortunately, I can't. Why do some people have joyful marriages that leave them happier than they could ever imagine, while other people's marriages leave them wondering what they were thinking and wondering what happened to the person they married?

The answer - I just don't know. There it is. All I know on the topic of marriage.

Now, as with most things, I have theories, ideas and thoughts, and dare I say, opinions. Let me begin with my story. I have been married for 13 years. For about half of that I have been married to the most amazing man in the world. He is sweet, funny, smart, and the most fabulous dad in the world. (I could go on but why bore you, just trust me, he's great!) So what happened halfway through our marriage to change my husband into this amazing guy? Nothing. Honestly. Nothing changed him. I changed. I changed how I saw this man and began to remember why I married him. I remembered all the things about him that I thought were so great when we were starry eyed kids in love. He's still the same man. He still has faults (I suppose), but now I don't really look at those things. I look at the amazing things about him and I love him more each day. It is an old saying, but it is true. It is possible to love someone more each day. If you don't, you love is likely to begin to fade rather than grow.

Now, I know. You are thinking that I am in denial. I am blinding myself to the bad things and living in some fantasy world. You think eventually it will all come out, my fantasy world will blow up. It's simply not true. When irritating things happen or my husband does something I didn't like, I get upset. I lose my temper, blow my stack. Sometimes I just tell him I didn't like whatever it was. But, I don't allow those things to make up in my mind about who he is.

Last night I read and interest series of quotations. This pretty well summarizes my theory about marriage.

Arthur Gordon, author of A Touch of Wonder, writes "I have noticed when the going gets rough the partners tend to demonize each other, see nothing good, only the bad. Result is mutual appreciation dies and there's nothing to cushion the shock in quarrels or recriminations. If combattants (sic) would make an effort to recall one or two things they used to admire in their partner and force themselves to say so, however grudgingly,it might save the marriage."
He also writes, "To be manifestly loved, to be openly admired are human needs as basic as breathing. Why, then, wanting them so much ourselves, do we deny them so often to others? Why indeed?"
Becky Freeman, author of Marriage 911, adds "There is no reason, with any solid legs to stand on, for human beings to withhold their admiration from each other. After all, it isn't as if by hoarding our words of praise we are keeping anything of value for ourselves."

I said earlier that my husband hadn't changed. That isn't entirely true. As I changed my view of him, my willingness to see the good more than the bad, he did change. He began to see more good in me. As we began speaking nice things into each others' lives, we began each to see the fruits of those things. Now, because my husband knows how I really feel about him, how great I think he is, he is willing to listen when I have honest complains or concerns. Likewise, now that I don't feel that I couldn't please him no matter what, and I know that he loves me for who I am, craziness and all, I am not so hurt when he needs to tell me things that help me grow.

I challenge you today, think of two reasons you began your relationship with your spouse. Think of two good things about him. Pray about these things, ponder them, and when next you see your spouse, compliment him or her. Say something kind, in a way that he will believe you. And everyday find a way to say something to your spouse that shows him that you do admire (at least something about) him. If you think this is too hard, or won't work ask yourself two questions "Is it harder than living in unhappiness and discontent? and What bad can come of reminding my spouse, and myself, what it is I love(d) about him?"