Tish Harrison Warren says she's glad she did — you might be too.
 | By Eleanor Barkhorn Editor at Large, Opinion |
At our first premarital counseling session, the priest who was to marry us asked my then-fiancé and me to name all the things we loved about the other. We wrote each quality down on a Post-it note and stuck them on the wall of the priest's office: Sense of humor. Love of baseball. Kindness. And so on. |
The priest let us admire the words for a few moments, and then one by one he removed each Post-it from the wall. |
"There are going to be days in your marriage where your spouse will display none of these qualities. What happens then?" |
We looked at each other, stunned, and laughed nervously. |
The priest was right, of course. Nine years later, we've learned that it's hard to maintain a sense of humor when you are lost, tired and hungry while visiting an unfamiliar city. Young children can make it impossible to watch a baseball game on TV, let alone take a trip to the stadium. Even kindness can fall away in seasons of illness, grief or stress. |
"There have been times when contempt settled on our relationship, caked and hard as dried mud," she writes. "We've both been unkind. We've both yelled curse words and stormed out the door. We both have felt we needed things that the other person simply could not give us." |
As strange as it felt at the time for our priest to begin our journey toward marriage by telling us how hard marriage could get, I'm grateful he let us know that we should expect challenges. This, ultimately, is the great gift of Warren's piece — the way it reminds us that stretches of difficulty or dissatisfaction are not necessarily a sign that the marriage is broken beyond repair. |
"I want to normalize significant periods of confusion, exhaustion, grief and unfulfillment in marriage," Warren writes. |
Indeed, despite the challenges, Warren is deeply grateful for her husband and for their marriage. |
"I know that we are learning to love each other with each passing day and that there is profound joy in that messy process," she writes. "There are nights when he sits quietly reading, and I look at his face and recall what a steep hill we've climbed and will keep climbing, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude that he has stuck with me, that we get to live this life together, with all the sorrow, betrayal, glory, loveliness, surprise and mystery that entails." |
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