Jenn Peppers is a life/career coach and coauthor of Finding the Flow.  She is enthusiastic about helping people find the true ease of themselves, cycling with her husband, and enjoying great meals with friends.
vergecoaching.com

Twenty years ago I was too young to understand what I was longing for.  Perhaps I still am.  Just out of high school, shattered by many bad relationships, and preferring numbness to feelings, I was unaware of my thirst.  I don’t remember much about the evening other than I didn’t expect to feel like I did.  Like I’d been awkwardly inserted into the middle of some other girl’s dream… perhaps the girl I had been just a year or two earlier.

Still I’ve never forgotten what he said before he left, “I’ve waited five years to kiss you and I’ll wait the rest of my life if I have to for anything more.”  I didn’t respond to him.  I just stood there and let him go.

Even though I had a list of reasons to doubt his words, I believed he meant what he said.  Not that he would wait.  But rather that I was worth the wait.  Really?  In a matter of a few seconds my perspective about my value as a woman started shifting.  I began to understand that my real value was the only thing I ever shared with this friend: my heart.

Fast-forward twenty years. Thanks to Facebook, I noticed a chance to reconnect and decided to avoid him. This is my best attempt at explaining why I decided to steer clear of someone who had been such a close friend and what recalling this memory has stirred in me.

When you receive a compliment as sentimental as “I’ll wait the rest of my life…” and it has the type of impact it had, it’s a risk to give up that memory.  A risk I didn’t want to take.  I was avoiding my friend because I wanted to protect this memory.  Somehow his compliment seemed like a cornerstone of my foundation.  What if reconnecting with him caused it to crumble?   I suppose it was possible that I would find out that he meant what he said and it was still true.  Yet it was also possible that my memory was totally off and wrought by misunderstandings.  Being that I am very happily married, I had no interest in the former.  Yet the latter somehow seemed much worse.  Was my foundation really that fragile?

I am starting to understand more deeply how I—how we all—thirst for an “I’ll wait the rest of my life” type of love.  To have a type of connection with someone that’s unconditional and cannot be broken.  In contrast, our relationships are often plagued by a sense that “if you knew the real me, you wouldn’t ___.”  Fill in the blank.  Wait.  Come after me.  Love me.  Stay.  Care if I cheated.  Be sad if I left… or even died.

In my marriage, the attractive façade I’ve carefully created has been chipped away. My husband has wandered far beyond it and knows that when he steps inside it’s not that pretty.  Some corridors are dark.  Others are neglected, cold, and damp.  Even though we’re fortunate to have a very special love, the opportunity to be known by him is something I both desire deeply and grieve regularly.  I vacillate between the two.  Come closer.  Stay the hell away.  More often than I’d like to admit I ask him to linger in the courtyard and admire.

I avoided my friend because by doing so I am more able to ignore that he doesn’t know the real me.  I like being able to hold on to the memory and distort the facts.  Like that we never spoke again after that night.  Never mind that it’s pretty likely we were both drunk, he was sort of in another relationship at the time, and I didn’t feel anything as he left or in the twenty years that followed.  To me, these facts are irrelevant.  All that matters is he said it.  That there is someone in this world that for a few seconds on one night thought I am worth a lifetime of waiting.  My heart somehow outsmarted my head with this memory… I tossed the truth and clung to an ideal.  Why?  I was grasping for something—anything—to fulfill my longing.

I stumbled across this statement recently (Broken Not Crushed Blog):

Can you imagine being told, “I love you completely. Exactly as you are. You don’t have to merit it. I will always love you. I will never leave you. I will never turn you away when you call.”  That is what my heart cries out for.  And yet I so often try to numb it or fill that longing with something, anything, except the One who truly satisfies.

Every so often I need to be reminded that nothing and no one can fulfill my deepest longing for unconditional love.  Only God.

I tend to—no, we all tend to—deny, ignore, or lack understanding our thirst for Him and drink of the world and each other instead.  Whatever we can get.  Food, art, sex, nature, TV, alcohol, shopping, intimacy, drugs, work, music, travel, Facebook, and so on.  And perhaps we feel satisfied.  Temporarily.  But then we want more.  Or we think, this is good, but if I only had that one thing that’s still missing.  Then I’d be satisfied.  If I had a spouse, baby, more friends, meaningful work, then life would be great.  Until we get that one thing and realize we’re still thirsty.  And the cycle continues.  It’s like guzzling wine at the end of a marathon to quench our thirst.  It may taste good, but only leaves us more dehydrated.

The hardest moments for me are when I realize I’ve been looking to my husband to do what only God can do.  Or my community, friends, colleagues… anyone who seems to think I’m pretty terrific.  (Or at least thought so twenty years ago.)  The more I’ve put this expectation on others, the more likely it is that I’ve felt deeply disappointed, misunderstood, lonely, confused, or unloved.  Not to mention afraid to let anyone really get to know me.

I wish that becoming more aware of all of the futile ways I try to quench my thirst resolved more for me.  After all, everything else is so tempting and available.  What do we do with our thirst when we realize the only way to really fulfill it is through something as intangible as God?  I am on a quest to answer this question.  Although I know the answer is elusive, letting go of some of the false substitutes seemed like a good place to start.  I’ve stopped avoiding my old friend and started asking God, “How is this story about you?”  I have pondered and reflected and prayed—and hope that someday I get it.

from the flickr photostream of wookieslayer

I was sitting on my cousin’s couch, alone, in the dark.  I didn’t want to, but I picked up my phone.  Instinct.  And dialed his number.  Habit.  I had just snapped at my cousin before she and my sister left to ran an errand and I was feeling bad about it.  I hate it when that little guy on the inside, whose job it is to hold the net and catch all of my nasty before it escapes my mouth, puts his net down and goes to the movies.  The phone rang.  I knew I should not be calling.  I wanted to do this on my own.  The feeling bad.  The knowing I should not have snapped.  And the knowing that I was still okay and loved and worthy even though I snapped.  He picked up the phone.  I didn’t hang up.  That would have been ridiculous.  But instead of saying, “I totally snapped at Betsy and she didn’t deserve it and I am a horrible person, please make me feel better about myself!!!” (which is really what I meant), I simply said, “Hi.  Being away from you for a long weekend is making me realize something:  I really depend on you to process my emotions.  I can hardly go through anything without wanting to call you to talk about.”

“Yeah”, he said, “you do have a high need to process your emotions with me.  And . . . you have a lot of emotions.”

We talked for a while.  About how much I need him to help me sort out what I am thinking and how I am feeling.  About how it is hard for me to process things on the inside.  By myself.  About how I am out of sorts until he comes along and reassures me.  Then he mentioned that he was sitting in his car in the Target parking lot.  In the rain.  “OH, I am so sorry babe.  I will let you go.”  With the fierce instincts of a mother lion, without even thinking, he replied, “NO!  Its okay!  This realization has been a long time coming!  I am happy to talk about it for as long as you would like!”

In marriage we enter this strange dance in which we try to become one entity with our spouse, all the while maintaining our own sense of identity.  Always the external processor, I talk everything out with Herb.  And he has always obliged.  But lately, I have been noticing that the weight of it feels a little heavy to him.  What I am realizing is that he does not mind listening.  But when he senses that I won’t be able to sort things out on my own - that I won’t be okay without him - he becomes weary.  And he should.  I never meant to be this girl.  This girl who comes undone, like that egg from the wall, and needs my prince to come put my pieces back together.

Forget the egg that can’t stay on the wall.  No, I long to be like that bouncy yellow ball from my playground days; tethered to a sturdy metal post.  And the metal post?  It is not going anywhere.  It is extremely secure in several inches of cement.  I envy that ball as it inevitably gets bounced around.  It does not feel great, I suspect, to be hit and twirled and thrown.  But even the biggest and strongest boys in my elementary school could not pound it hard enough to make it go flying across the playground.  It always stayed securely in place when the big blows came.  And they always come, don’t they?  In life and in Tether Ball?  They always come.

Despite my “oneness” with my sweet husband, there is a place, a time, a context in which I am still one.  Singular.  By myself.  And as that individual, I want to be tethered to nobody but myself.  When the hard knocks come, I want to be grounded within myself and in my faith.  It will hurt and it won’t make sense.  But it won’t shake me.  So I have been getting to know myself again.  I figure, getting to know myself will build trust in myself.  It will allow me to sink into myself, like several inches of cement.  Being tethered to myself will keep me focused and complete in the face of chaos, and damage, and painful conversations.  And when that next big blow comes?  It won’t send me sailing.  I will be tethered.  To myself.  And myself is a pretty good place.

Josh and Mandy Wright have been married for nearly 11 years.  They live in St. Louis, MO with their three kiddos!

What triggers (past or present) your day-dreams about leaving your marriage?

He Said:

I don’t know that I’ve ever really thought too much about leaving my marriage—my daydreams are about what things would have been like had I never gotten married, or if I had gotten married or had kids later in life.  We were married and had kids at a very young age, and that has presented a unique set of challenges for Mandy and I to contend with.  When I dream about a change in my marital circumstances, the dream typically involves some path that avoided those challenges.

She Said:

I can’t say I really think about leaving my marriage.  Not because things have been sooo easy but because I know that God gave me Josh to bless me.  I really believe that, and my desire to receive those future blessings that He has for me and my family get me through the rough times.

When you think about leaving your marriage (past or present), what is it you want that you think you could find/have as a single person?

He Said:

Less financial stress, fewer impediments to the pursuit of my career and educational goals, more time to run and play guitar.  I think every man wants to be free, wants to find his fortune, wants to make a name for himself.  Any time you feel some insecurity or dissatisfaction relating to one of these ideals, it’s the most natural thing in the world to rationalize the discomfort by blaming your wife.

She Said:

Sometimes I think that it would be exhilarating to be doted over and longed for by someone; just like I was by my husband before he captured my heart.

Melanie Kleimola is a part-time English Graduate student at Northern Illinois University, a full-time wife to Andrew and mother to her two children, Aidan and Catie.  You can find more of Melanie’s insights and stories on Does This Blog Make Me Look Fat?
When I was single, I hated being alone. In a lot of ways, for much of my adult life, I hated my singleness. This was not a long period of time, as I married at age 24, but still, I longed for marriage: to experience unconditional love, intimacy and let’s be honest, sex. My husband and I wasted no time. We met, dated, married, and even bought our first house within one year.

Last month, Cara posted something here about marriage being filled with unexpected things about your partner. Unbearable morning breath, odd bathroom habits, and general sloppiness are a few things that might surprise a young bride or groom about a person who had been on their best behavior prior to the wedding. But for me, the biggest surprise didn’t come from my husband; it came from me. Marriage has revealed many things about ME that I either did not know were there, or was simply able to ignore prior to the wedding.

As a single person, I think I was generally able to keep my own undesirable qualities in check most of the time. When I found myself in situations that brought out the worst in me, I had the opportunity to remove myself, take a break and regroup. While marriage does afford a person some quiet alone time, if a couple is really about the business of becoming one, then even if one or the other finds herself alone, her husband is still with her. On a practical level, the sharing of one’s space and world and life and relationships and friendships and time and money and self can be overwhelming at times. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, I am always Andrew’s wife.

What was once a selfish need for perfection can now impact the way my husband feels about himself. My problem with anger is now my kids’ problem with anger. These people now have an all access 24/7/365 pass to my life. It forces me to look at myself, to see myself good, bad and ugly. And sometimes this really sucks. The hardest thing about marriage and family for me is that they challenge me more than anything ever has, as such bringing me to the end of myself where all the tired, anxious, ugly habits hide. There is no escaping now; I HAVE to deal with it.

While I have found my marriage is a place of grace and forgiveness most of the time, looking into the eyes of that person I love the most knowing that my shortcomings have hurt him is not an easy thing. There are times when I’d prefer his anger over his kindness. Nothing leads the heart to repentance like forgiveness. Sometimes when we argue, my husband and I have said to one another that we feel undeserving of the other’s love. Awhile ago, I started responding that no one deserves love because it’s a gift.

Sometimes in marriage we just have to receive the love, grace and forgiveness our spouse offers us. In the same way marriage and family can bring out the worst in us, it can also bring out the best in us. When we face the ugliness in ourselves, knowing that it impacts the people we love and cherish is a great motivator to submit to the transforming power that God offers each of us everyday.

For a recap on all of our panelists, see here.

Jodie Allen
Matt Whiteford
Courtney Lynch	Dave Huff

Can marriage change a person?

Jodie: Yes, totally.

Matt: If marriage does not change a person, than I don’t think that person is married.  There is no way to go from 2 to 1 without changing.  I think that’s why so many marriages don’t make it (that was for free).

Courtney: Yes and No.  The only person it can change is the one who wants to be changed.  If that is you, then you will change, if that is your spouse, then they will change.

Dave: Um, it had better change a person.  What else should we expect?  A marriage is a living, breathing entity in many ways, and can only grow and mature if the two people who comprise the union grow and mature.  Anything else is simply an agreement for two individuals to operate their lives under the same roof with tax benefits.  What we must not expect of our spouse (or ourselves for that matter) is how and when change and growth shall take place – we must simply make room for it to happen through grace, patience and the humility that accompanies an understanding that we do not have the clairvoyance to know what is best for the other.

Should we expect our spouse to change and

grow over the years?

Jodie: Yes, but never in the way we hope! I know Chris wishes desperately that I would change and not be such a pile-creator. Or that I would stop leaving 15 water glasses on my bedside table. Or that I would clean my car out once in a while. And I of course wish he saw the things I did around our home more clearly. And I wish he would get used to the fact that I am not a good cook and probably never will be. However. In just 4+ short years we are changing how we speak to each other so as not to purposely hurt one another when angry. And we are learning to be more patient with one another, more forgiving and less judgmental. I try to keep my piles to a minimum and he takes care of my water glasses without saying a word.

Matt: Second part, yes, however sometimes I think we focus more on our spouses changing than ourselves.  It is easy to point the finger and blame Sherri for not changing as I sit here avoiding changing the things that will ultimately make our marriage better even if she doesn’t change.  Sometimes the change I think should be happening in Sherri’s life is not the change that she needs (again, playing to the selfish thing).

Courtney: I think that our daily influence on a person and, theirs on us, can change the way a person reacts, behaves and performs in life, but it is slow and requires tons of consistency.  I also think that the core of a person – their character - will not change unless they want to change.Dave: What we must not expect of our spouse (or ourselves for that matter) is how and when change and growth shall take place – we must simply make room for it to happen through grace, patience and the humility that accompanies an understanding that we do not have the clairvoyance to know what is best for the other.

taken from yoshiko314’s flickr photostream

Each week I leave a short story or video blog here about where I saw love in action during the previous week.  Looking for love in the world around us inspires us to look for love everywhere - especially in our marriages.  Feel free to play along!!!

The past month has been very busy for me.  I am working more than I have in several years, and in addition, I am posting on this blog at least three times a week.  And while I love everything I am doing, I am just a little overcome by the new business!  The other day, I mentioned to Herb how fast my car has become trashed since living a busier lifestyle and making multiple wardrobe changes throughout the day.

Yesterday, I went to Dream Dinners to make some meals for Chad and Allison.  I asked Herb to go to a coffee shop while he waited for me (we went to breakfast first, so he just dropped me off to meet my friend Rachael at the meal place and had an hour or two to kill before picking me up).  My husband tends to set high standards for himself, and he does not like to rest or take care of himself (especially if he would have fun or enjoy the process) until he has met his self-imposed high standards.  This worries me.  So, I asked him to please find a newspaper and go enjoy a coffee for an hour and a half.  After we made the meals, Rachael dropped me off at Cafe Europa.  Herb had a coffee and a paper and was listening to music.

He seemed to have heeded to my request.  Then we walked outside.  My car was clean.  Before going to the coffee shop, Herb washed my car.  He vacuumed it.  He washed the mats.  And then, so as to avoid confusion about why he did it, he said, “I was hoping this was a really practical way of showing you that I love you today.”  Even his thoughtfulness in making that clarification was an act of love, because I have a tendency to interpret these kinds of things to mean, “You are so lazy and slow, so I had to do this FOR YOU or it would NEVER have gotten done!”  But that was no the case.  My man simply heard me as I worried about wondered aloud about how I would possibly get everything done this week, and he approached me in love by responding, “You don’t have to.  I can help.”

Where did YOU see love in action this week???