Imagine the person you love. What if they sacrificed themselves on the altar of your relationship?
In marriage as in most things, we tend to strive for success. We’ve made a commitment. We’ve made a promise. We’ve made vows, “in sickness and in health, til death do us part” …. or something.
How would you feel if you went into a marriage being perfectly OK with it failing? How would you feel if the person you married felt that way?
It sounds cold, it sounds cynical.
In my first marriage, which was problematic from the start, we went to a marriage counselor the first year of our marriage. He led with a statement about how in order to really do good therapeutic work, divorce needed to be an option. We left and never went back because, for us, it wasn’t an option. Twelve or so years later, I went to a therapist to work on some anger issues I was having. She led with a statement about how in order to really do good therapeutic work, I was going to have to be willing to consider ending my marriage as an option. I stopped seeing her immediately. It wasn’t an option.
Of course, if you read my blog you know that my marriage fell apart anyway and divorce, which had never been an option became a reality. I’ve come to believe that one of the things that contributed to the failure of that relationship was the fact that divorce was not an option.
I know, that sounds weird. Backward. Like an oxymoron.
But there are a lot of deeply spiritual principles that are backward, upside-down, oxymoronic.
Love your enemies.
Blessed are those that mourn.
Rejoice in suffering.
Lose your life to find it.
It’s the final one that speaks to my cynical view on relationships. And here’s why. If failure is not an option, then the game becomes about survival and success and not about love. If the goal is success, then one or both people in the relationship may stop being authentic and lose touch with what they want and who they are. If the goal is survival of the relationship, one or both people may essentially give up anything and everything to preserve the relationship. The problem with that is that if you give up anything and everything, you ultimately lose yourself as well. You give yourself up in service to the preservation of the relationship. And then guess what? It’s not a relationship you are in anymore. But rather, some version of yourself that you have created that you think will lead to success. But not the real you. Not the one that person fell in love with to begin with.
Relationships take risk.
You have to be brave.
You have to embrace death to live.
You have to be able to say, “This is me. This is what I want. This is who I am and what kind of relationship I’m interested in.”
You have to be able to say, “If that’s not what you want, that’s OK, but I’m not willing to lose myself in order to save the relationship.”
and….
“I don’t want you to either.”
Some might disagree and say that the ultimate romantic move is for someone to give everything up for them.
“This is how we know what love is, to lay down one’s life for another.”
But laying down one’s life is vastly different than being fake and living a lie. Laying down one’s life certainly means sacrifice, but it doesn’t mean dishonesty.
Imagine the person you love. What if they sacrificed themselves on the altar of your relationship? What if they quit doing what they love, gave up their passions, stopped being THEM for you? Can you imagine what a tragedy it would be? How BORING it would be to be with that shell of who they really are?
The times that I’ve had the courage to say to my husband, “This is me and this is what I want and if this is not what you want it’s OK.” THOSE were the times I was laying down my life. I was putting my heart out there to get broken in the name of honesty. In the name of being true to myself and in the name of allowing him to be true to who he is and what he wants.
Those other times? When I was pretending to be something else, or cramming myself into a box that I thought might please? Those times I was trying to force my agenda on him and asked him to be dishonest about what he wanted so that I would be more comfortable? That wasn’t laying down my life, that was just living a falsehood in order to control an outcome.
To lay down your life is the ultimate risk, the ultimate surrender. It involves no control of any kind.
Because love can only exist where there is freedom.
“The law brings death, but the spirit of grace brings life.”