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.

There are two kinds of women in the world: those who can wear high heels and those who can’t.
But that has nothing to do with this article. Let’s start over.

There are two kinds of women in the world: those whose sex drive is weaker than their husbands’ and those whose sex drive is stronger than their husbands’.

There’s a possibility of a third, minority group of women whose luck in life is to have a sex drive exactly matched by their husbands’, but I’ve yet to meet one. Or maybe I’ve met one and I just didn’t realize it, because that’s not the sort of thing you write on your name tag. “Hello, I’m Louise and I’m one of the few happy women whose sex drive is spot on with her husband!” Yeah. It would make for a large name tag, and they always make your lapel look goofy as it is. If you’re wearing something with lapels, that is, which these days is as rare as a steak that’s still mooing.

Anyway, back to the two kinds of women.
Right off the bat you know which one you are, don’t you? That’s okay, though, you don’t have to tell me. I’ve conducted a survey, and according to the non-scientific results of my poll, it seems that each scenario is equally common. Yeah, you read that right, you sex-crazed women.

You’re not weird or anything, we’re just dealing with the residual effect of a fifties-Americana housewife stereotype. You know, the gal who was always baking a pie or vacuuming or holding her new wonder-cleaning product in well-manicured hands. The one whose smile always had that gleaming tooth. The one who most definitely never initiated sex. That one. I just have one thing to say about her:
Why do you think she was always wearing a skirt?

Ponder that.

There’s no real rocket science to this subject matter. It’s really just another look into the way you’re different than the man you married. Either he wants sex more often than you do, or you want sex more often than he does. And, as with all differences that exist between a woman and her husband, this one is superb for generating miscommunication, hurt feelings, anger, frustration, and large expenditures on new lingerie. Not that the last one’s a bad thing, necessarily…

Here’s where it gets touchy, though. (Touchy… get it? Ha, ha, ha…wait. Why am I the only one laughing?) People seem to have a hard time talking about sex. (Hard time… get… oh never mind.) Well, people talk about sex all the time, actually. They make jokes about it, have casual conversations about it, make endless innuendos about it… but when it comes to a real, honest talk about it with their mate-for-life? AH! Shame, embarrassment, chagrin, fear, stress. The crassness of our culture gives us an infinite supply of dirty jokes and sexual stereotypes, but it doesn’t give us any real ways of talking about sex.

Try having a serious conversation about sex and see how many terms come to mind that are demeaning or humorous or just make you feel like a 5th-grader.

The thing is, sex makes us vulnerable. Our culture treats it lightly (and crassly) as a way of covering up the vulnerability without abstaining from the sex. Well, that’s great for them (though I have my doubts about the effectiveness of the method) but for two people who are married, vulnerability isn’t something we need to avoid. And if we could come to terms with being vulnerable, we could have the conversations we need to have.

Something like this:

The wife whose husband wants sex more often than she does might say, “Honey, I love you and I want you, but I don’t want you all the time. I don’t know how to explain that because I’m afraid you’ll feel hurt or rejected or unwanted, but that’s not it at all. I’m just not built the same as you, and sometimes I can’t respond the same way you do. I need you to give me a way to be who I am without feeling guilty, angry, and resentful. I need you to help me find the time and the way to switch from being busy, working, stressed to just being with you. Sometimes it takes me a while to get there. It doesn’t mean I don’t want or need you, it just means I need your patience and understanding.”

The wife whose husband wants sex less often than she does might say, “Honey, I love you and I know you want me, but when I initiate and you’re not interested I feel so rejected. I know we’re different people, but my self-esteem and identity as a woman is all tied up in how sexy you think I am. When you’re not interested in sex and I am, I feel rejected not just as your wife but as a woman. I start questioning everything about myself – my looks, my body, my desirability, your love, my sex appeal. I really need affirmation from you. I need help to understand that you still find me appealing and desirable, but you need time to switch gears, too.”

I don’t know. What if we could have conversations like that? What if we could broach the subject without being silly or oversensitive? Would that change things? Would it improve our relationships? I think so. I think it would remove much of the stress. And I think if some of the stress were removed from the whole subject, we would have a lot more fun.

Fun is good.

Oh, by the way, did you figure out which kind of woman I am?

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Images courtesy of mistress_f and x ray delta one.

1. Don’t expect the person to change.
2. Avoid retaliation.Don’t take get-even actions and words. Go the opposite direction: turn the other cheek. Turn negative energy into positive outward response.
3. Love, which means a. do good to (Luke 6:27) and b. bless (speak well of them). Jesus defines love not as an emotion but as action. Not “feel good” but “do good.” No matter how many true but negative things you know and could say, choose to bless instead. Step into the maturity of God’s relationships.
4. Pray. Prayer comes not first, but last in the sequence. Accept first, let go of vengeance first, love first; then pray. It’s important to keep that in mind.

So, I’m sitting there listening and I realize I don’t know very many truly difficult people. Dr. Bailey defined a “difficult person” for us: someone who is emotionally unresponsive, self-centered, uncommunicative, blind to their faults, critical… I can think of one or two people who really fit that description, and none that I have to see regularly. Sure, there are lots of us who have some of those traits. Everybody is difficult sometimes.

I was tempted to tune out. Don’t know any difficult people, don’t need to know what to do with them, right? But then Dr. Bailey started talking about how to deal with these difficult people, and it hit me that these 4 little steps are what we women need. It’s a manual on marriage. It’s how we should treat our husbands.

Some of them are difficult people, certifiably so. Some of us are. But even if he’s a great guy and you’re a great gal, employing Step #1 alone would save most of the offenses and arguments that sneak up. If that didn’t do it, Step #2 almost certainly would, and Step #3 would cover any loose ends. But we spiritual women-folks, we like to skip to Step #4. Especially if we can involve a friend or two for group prayer.

Silly women. Love first, pray later. Say it with me now. Love first, pray later.

Look, I can call you silly because I’m a woman too. Young, sure. Immature, sure. Full of myself, sure. Don’t kill the messenger, ladies. Quit praying for your husband to shape up and be a better man, and start loving him and being a better woman. It’s not that difficult (okay, I know sometimes that being nice is akin to ripping your heart from your chest, but do it anyway).

5 Minute Action Point:

Start applying the 4 difficult-people principles. Focus on accepting, not retaliating, and showing love in action by doing something nice. Here are five things you could do today that would be nice:
1. Give him a sweet kiss.
2. Ask him for one thing to do that would help him out today, then do it.
3. Be quiet. Yes, that’s an official nice thing.
4. Thank him for something.
5. Cook him something he loves to eat.

None of that is so difficult, is it?

Image courtesy of Theodore99.