While we were engaged, innocent young lovers who hadn’t yet kissed, we got lots of marriage advice. Sport a ring and a goofy look and you’re just too obvious a target, apparently. The advice usually ran along these lines:

• Enjoy your freedom while it lasts.
• Oh, look at you now, but just wait till the honeymoon’s over.
• Soon it will just be fight, fight, fight.
• You’re so young to get married! (I was 24, he was 23 when we got married.)

We happily disregarded the doomsayers, bought flowers, (oh no wait, that was Dad), bought a cake (oh wait, that was Dad too), invited our 200 closest friends and relatives, and got married. It was lovely.

Then the honeymoon ended and, well, we were still happy. We made a few minor discoveries. Ah, well, we thought. It’s all part of the adventure. And while now, instead of counting the days until we got married, we started counting the number of times we looked at each other and said, “Huh?” in complete bewilderment, we were still pretty starry-eyed. Young love.

Then we didn’t get pregnant, and that was stressful because I started thinking of all sorts of things that might be wrong and what would it be like if we couldn’t have kids and oh-no and what will we do and we’d better get health insurance, fast and then,

We did get pregnant, and Joe was the perfect husband and rubbed my back and rubbed my feet and told me I was beautiful when my belly button disappeared, and when my ankles disappeared, and then,

Mara was born. And we realized how very, very foolish we had been all that time before she was born, taking sleep for granted the way we had. But we loved being parents and so,

We got pregnant again.

I could go on. The point is, the bad marriage advice never came true. Life happened. The honeymoon ended. We had kids. We lived together. We experienced joy, grief, loss, regret, and that was just in the first three months of home ownership. We won’t even go into real grief, loss of family, tight budgets, job changes, stress, pregnancy, post-partum, life with a baby, life with a baby and a toddler, life with a baby and a toddler and a preschooler.

The other point is, the bad marriage advice did come true, kind of. The underlying statement behind all those negative predictions was this: “You kids think you know each other and you think you’re in love and you think you’ll be happy; but you don’t really know each other, and once you do, you’ll realize you’re not in love and you’ll be terribly unhappy. The end.”

And truthfully? We really didn’t know each other. The simple truth is that no matter how in love you are, how thoroughly prepared, how close… you are two different people and marriage will make that obvious in ways nothing else can.

Our advice-givers made a correct assumption (we didn’t really know each other the way we thought we did) but they drew an incorrect conclusion. We did find out a lot of things about each other, and not all of them were, well, love-inducing. For example, did you know that

• Joe’s belly button will collect lint every single day without fail, even if he walks around stark naked?
• men have a genetic mutation that prevents them from accurately estimating the distance across the room to the laundry hamper, which will invariably result in a pile of dirty clothes placed six to eighteen inches around the hamper?
• women can blame PMS and hormones for everything?
• I have a really good whiny-annoying “baby” voice that sometimes manifests itself without my prior knowledge or consent?
• Joe likes Hamburger Helper? Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Gross. Ew.
• I can easily spend $50/week on coffee and coffee-related, uh, accoutrements?

I kid you not, my friends. These things are true and yet our marriage has survived. In fact, not only has it survived, it has been awesome. Strange and shocking, sometimes, yes. But strange and shocking aren’t so strange and shocking once you get used to ‘em. Really.

In marriage, you can’t dwell on the differences. If you do, your common ground gets smaller and smaller, and that’s when you start asking yourself those questions. Why did I marry him? What do we even have in common? Do I even know him? Is he anything like me? Silent but deadly, those questions, like the smell in the room after a meal at White Castle. Just don’t even go there – to the questions or to White Castle.

Instead, get over it. (And cook something better at home, like beans.) Emphasize the common ground. Accommodate the differences. Seek out the strengths. Overlook the weaknesses. Balance each other out; that’s why God brought you together in the first place.

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Image courtesy of Made Underground.

1. The book must be interesting. If I am having to drag my attention to the page, am distracted by the fly buzzing on the window, I give it up. Good bye. Not worth my time.
2. The book must be positive. I don’t mean that it must be full of morals-of-the-story, happy people, shiny places, fairies, rainbows, and other flights of not-so-realistic fancy. (Not that I have anything against flights of fancy.) What I mean is that the overall tone of the book, the current that pulls me along through the happy and sad people, through the shiny and dirty places, must tend upward instead of downward. For example, I won’t be reading Kurt Cobain’s journals. I know the trend because I know how the story ends. I’m sure I could learn something, but inundating myself with page after page of a mindset that led toward death by overdose is another waste my time. I would read Anne Frank’s diary, or Corrie Ten Boom’s, or those of others who have lived through horrible things but have created an upward current from it.
3. The book must be well-written. I am adamant about this, even with (or especially with) non-fiction works. Anyone who cannot follow the rudimentary principles of grammar and style has no business publishing a book. (I have a strange feeling this comment will come back to haunt me when I have a book published. Critics, rejoice.) As a writer, I want what I read to influence my writing to become clearer, not muddier. What we read influences not only what we write, but what we think, how we think, what we say and how we say it: a phenomena that explains why most teenagers talk in abbreviations since most of what they read is text messages.

That’s it. Three little rules, but they have saved me from many hours wasted on halfway decent books. There are plenty of great books to read out there. Find them, read them, love them, and don’t feel like you have to give time to anything less than great.