ANOTHER JUNE HAS ARRIVED

 It's June already. Our anniversary is June 4, and it always arrives as a surprise. This is the front of the Anniversary card my husband gave me this year.  We have a tradition of doggie pictures.  The card I gave him has a corgi and a schnauzer on it, but this one is better.  I love it.  

We've had so many anniversaries that we can't remember where we spent them all.  Some traveling of course; after all, it is June.  One in London, one in Rome, one in Alaska and the Canadian west, several at little B&Bs, but most with good friends or family, often at the grill in our own backyard. This year we met close friends who also have a June anniversary for supper at a local place with an outdoor patio.

Tongue-in-cheek, I will tell you the secrets of a long marriage:  marry young, live long and don't get divorced.  I will also tell you the actual keys to a good marriage, at least some of them:  don't keep secrets from one another; don't hurt one another--but if you do, stop, repent and apologize when you're wrong and forgive when you're right; cling together during traumas, no matter how brutal; do what's best for the marriage.  There are other secrets of course.  Sleeping like spoons helps.  Embracing often, whether when making love or not, is good.  Physical touching restores.  Fight fair, don't try to one-up, listen to each other, show interest.  So many of the things we do to maintain all of our friendships   

Be together more than you're apart. Love with abandon.  Give each other space, but not too much.  Don't put others before the marriage, not even other family.  Don't let grievances simmer; address them with persistence but kindness.  

I'm not an expert.  No one is, not even the 'experts.' But we have survived the most difficult of times and will miss the other desperately when one is gone. And yet we prepare for that too, in our way, discussing our blessings and how one of us might live when alone.  And as it happens, we have our faith.  That always helps.  

So, June it is.  Just moments ago, it seems, we were enjoying the cold days and dark nights of winter.  That's a good time to strengthen a marriage too.  But for the hubbub of Christmas and the hours at our jobs, we tend to hibernate in winter, like animals in dens or coiled under the leaves waiting to be roused by the sun.  Most of us love that slower time of year.  It's a time to cuddle under blankets with Netflix.  Whether with someone or not, it's a special time to be kind to yourself.  I like the saying, "Nothing is missing, you are already whole."

Spring is brief where I live and summer long.  And now it is here, not according yet to the calendar-- still a few days away--but already we are headed to the longest day and shortest night.  The winter solstice is barely over when the summer one is in our sights.  Every year the quickness of the cycle is a reminder of the brevity of life.  It's a truism that hours might drag but years do not.

What shall we do from anniversary to anniversary, from winter to summer, from birthday to birthday?  I'd like to be better at savoring.  If you're single, savor your independent life.  If you're in a good marriage, savor that.  Since we're aging, savor that.  We have lived longer, know more, think with more precision, understand how the past affects the present and the present, the future.  We have achieved much, I in my long marriage and on my own, you wherever in life you are.  

I am so glad it is June, and we are headed to the longest day.  Let us savor the light.  And when the year is half over, let us look to the approaching longest night.  Nothing is missing, our lives are already whole.  

                                    Congratulations to all, Nina Naomi

HEALTHY ATTITUDES (LOVERS AND FRIENDS)

Friendship is born at the moment

when one person says to another, "What!

You too?  I thought that no one but myself. . . .

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Each friend represents a world in us,

a world not possibly born until they arrive, 

and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. 

Anais Nin (1903-1977)

I felt it shelter to speak to you.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) 

These quotations remind me of a marriage.  Perhaps given how long I have been married, that is inevitable.  I suspect we all have a best friend or two and if our spouse is one, so much the better.  But good no matter what.  When I am outside raking Mr. Wiggles is my best friend.  I protect him from the hawks circling and he bravely routs the deer.  

Dr. Mary Pipher (Post 3/9/19) calls the friends who navigate life with us our "Travel Companions."  She calls our spouses our "Co-Captains."  On the day that our son called to say the doctor thought it was melanoma, long-time friends showed up to help us through the night.  I say his name in my heart as I write this.  When the cancer returned almost two years later different friends came to sit with us.  Friends came every day until he died.  On that day a car with an out-of-state license plate was in the driveway when we returned from the hospital.  "These better be friends," I said.  Sure enough they were.  We were plied with food and prayers.  Friends provided shelter.  We survive. 

With best friends and spouses we can communicate complicated multilayered emotions with few words or none.  We're lucky when we have a friend with whom together we create a new entity--the friendship. They share our pain. "Women," Pipher says, "excel at troubles talk."  Isn't that the truth!  And they amplify our pleasure.  Pipher says we can define our wealth as the time we have available to nurture our friendships.  I would add our marriages as well.  The time we share as co-captains, equal in partnership. 

 

Some marriages falter after the death of a child, or any trauma.  Anais Nin expresses it like this:

Love never dies a natural death.

It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source.

It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals.

It dies of illness and wounds. 

It dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Anais Nin

As she says, it takes blindness or betrayal to kill love.  Wounds that won't heal, or a withering from neglect.  A misplaced allegiance that tarnishes the relationship.  

But some marriages grow stronger.  The partners work to replenish love's source.  Their love becomes their glory.  Couples can choose to bear their traumas together, can choose a new vigilance and not grow weary. Some couples learn to have difficult conversations.  Some feel a rush of tenderness when they look at one another. 

Many of us have read Madeline L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time).  She says,

A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility,

to friendship, to companionship. 

It is certainly not that passion disappears,

But that it is conjoined with other ways of love. 

Madeline L'Engle (1918-2007)

This is what I've been thinking about this lovely North Carolina spring day. It's true that there are toxic 'friendships' and marriages that are better severed.  Friendships that serve ego needs and marriages of unkindness.  But there are many of the other kind too, aren't there?  Friendships we keep alive not out of habit but because we want to spend time together.  Marriages we know are healthy because when we are apart we miss each other.  All of these quotes by better thinkers than I am.  I bow to them.  Nina Naomi

 

 

 

HEALTHY ATTITUDES (MARRIAGE)

 

Linda Hock, "Set for Two," Mattie King Davis Gallery, Beaufort, NC

What makes a healthy marriage?  How much independence should spouses give up in order not to hurt one another?  These questions are not meant for abusive or unequal relationships.  They are meant for relationships where both partners want nothing more than comfort, peace, companionship  and love and want it to last a lifetime.  

It doesn't have to be in a marriage.  But it is a marriage where people take vows, make promises, become a new entity.  It is a marriage that creates duties.  Some are absolute duties--the duty of fidelity (emotional, spiritual and physical) for example.  If it is a Christian marriage the partners are "made one in Christ."  A marriage or other committed relationship brings the obligation of no secrets.  This does not mean every moment of the past has to be deconstructed.  But it does mean no present secrets.  No e-mails that the other cannot read.  No conversations that flourish in private.  No intimacy in word or thought with someone else.  In other words, no one about whom one partner has to claim, "We're just friends."  These are by nature betrayals.  And, no self-deceit that allows such a relationship outside the marriage to exist. 

The best way to avoid these situations is to be honest with ourselves and open with our spouses.  If we want to have coffee with someone and we know (or should know--that's the hallmark of 'no self-deceit') that our spouse will be made uneasy by this, we don't do it.  To ignore our spouse's preference out of a need for independence is devaluing our spouse.  It jeopardizes something of paramount importance (a lifetime relationship) for something less, whatever that lesser thing may be. 

Whenever we choose something that has even the potential of causing discomfort to the person to whom we are committed, we are making a statement.  "I  want something (or someone) other than you, even for just a few hours. I'm happy to maintain our status quo but only if I can do what I want. I have moved beyond the friends who strengthen our marriage. I want [admiration, a feeling of youthfulness, the buoyancy of a 'special friendship,' whatever . . .] even if that bothers you (or would if you knew)."  Otherwise why not ask,  "I was thinking about catching up with so and so.  Are you free to do that with me? "  Now that makes a healthy marriage!  

There may still be questions as to why you want to catch up with so and so.  But at least nothing will occur in private.  Boundaries will be set.  After all, private is the same as secret.  And if our spouse says, "No, I don't want to come and I don't want you to meet with him/her either," that is something we should respect.  Friends should be friends of the marriage.  Friends of the marriage are healthy.  Of course, friends of only one of us can easily become friends of the marriage.  That happens all the time.  But if one person doesn't want their friend who is the same sex as their spouse to be the friend of both, if he or she raises some obstacle, that it itself is tell-tale. 

I've been reading the memoir of a friend of our marriage.  A friend who lives in South Africa, was important in the struggle against apartheid, and who is now a widower (watch for the publication of I Beg to Differ by Peter Storey).  He has written about his marriage, 

     "No marriage is without struggles; the law of self-disclosure makes it  impossible to hide our self-truths no matter how adept we think we are at disguising them.  But much depends on whether the frailties thus exposed are grasped as opportunities to find 'a more perfect union' or as reasons to cut and run.  I won't traverse the sore places which I, more than [my wife] created, except to stand in awe of how much more ready she was to learn and grow from them."

Ah, do not we all want to have and to be such a spouse?  Would not our lives be easier, more God-pleasing, more honest and sincere if we used every opportunity for a more perfect union? I am drawn to the statement, "The law of self-disclosure makes it impossible to hide our self-truths no matter how adept we think we are at disguising them." My husband and I have been working on that.  Not surprisingly, it makes for some amazingly wonderful times.  I want to thank God for those.  Thank you, God.  Nina Naomi