marriage Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

I Should Have Married the Other Man

I should have married the other man

I wish I had married the other man.

You know the other man—every good romance has one. He’s the one who vies with the hero for the maiden’s attention. He is good and kind and handsome like the hero, but enough different that you don’t know which one she’ll choose until the very end of the story.

After sixteen years of marriage, I think I chose the wrong one. I should have married the other man.

I stand in my kitchen, sometimes, beating eggs while the man I chose sleeps in, and I think to myself, “The other man would not put wadded up socks in the wash, and he wouldn’t make that face in every single family picture. He would spend less time in his office and not go to Walmart for eggs and come home with Doritos.”

(The other man would understand that I can consume an entire bag of Doritos in my mind and the calories will somehow manifest on my thighs.)

I think about the hard parts of our marriage, where our differences rub each other wrong, and the parts that make me ache, and I wish things were different.

But then I spy a little yellow sticky-note on the coffee maker, and I see my man’s microscopic, scribbly handwriting proclaiming his love for me in pencil. There’s a hand-drawn silly face at the bottom, like always, and it makes me smile, like always.

The other man would probably send me roses and let the sixteen-year-old clerk write the words he dictates over the phone onto a little paper card so I wouldn’t have to strain to make them out.

The man I chose comes out of the bedroom and sees me deciphering his words.

“Hey, Baby,” he grins as he wraps his arms around me. “Let me make you some coffee.”

He might bring home Doritos, but the man makes the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. I don’t even know how he does it because I’ve watched and there is absolutely no magic involved.

The other man would fly me to Paris for espresso in a little café where I would wish the cups were bigger.

I Wish I had Married the Other Man

“What are you working on today?” my man asks, and he listens as I babble on about this project or that one while the eggs cook. Hesitantly, I tell him that I need to spend a little money to keep up this writing gig I’ve got.

The other man would be independently wealthy, of course, but this one, the one I chose, has to work hard for every penny. I see his uniform draped over the banister, and I know that he’s given up more for me than I have for him.

“Do it,” he says while pouring coffee into my favorite mug. “Spend the money. Your writing is worth it.”

Tears singe my eyes. The other man wouldn’t make me cry.

The kids tumble down the stairs with sleep-ratted hair. “Dad!” they scream because they’ve forgotten it’s Saturday, and he’s home.

He air-punches the boys and hugs the girls. “You know,” he says over the hub, “when your mom’s a famous writer, I can be a stay-at-home dad.”

The kids cheer, and my husband looks at me with a sly grin and says, “I’m secure like that.”

I am not, and I have to swallow a little bit of fear that I might not turn out as great as he thinks I am.

“I’m going to have to write a lot of books before I can afford to keep you home,” I mumble, but even in that moment, I can’t help but soak up the way he loves our kids.

The other man could not have made me a mother. Not their mother.

“You will,” he says, because he married me not only for who I am, but for who he believed I could be. “I know you will.”

The other man would not be so delusional, I think.

He would not have looked at my swollen belly and sleep-deprived eyes and believed I could be a great mother. He would not have waited patiently through sixteen years of marriage for me to grow and change and stop leaving my makeup all over his side of the counter.

He would not be waiting still.

The other man would have whisked me around the world in his corporate jet and let me tag along while he did amazing things.

The Other Man

But the man I chose has made a home with me.

It is not a perfect home, of course, but then, no home is. It is built together by two imperfect people who, if given the chance, can choose to see all the broken bits, all the failings, and all the shortcomings. They can choose to compare the worst in their spouse with the best in another option, and they can think that life would have been better if they had made a different choice.

Or, they can choose to believe that, barring extremes, the very best husband or wife for them is the one they married. They can choose to focus on the blessings–those bits of the hard that rub them more holy and grow them up and make them better than they ever would have been alone.

Because every marriage has its hard, even the other marriage or the next marriage or the marriage you think someone else has that you don’t.

Even mine.

The comfort is that God’s very best for me is the man I said “yes” to all those years ago. Despite the hard days, the imperfections, and the growth that still needs to come in both of us, I could not have had a better life with any other man.

He is the only other man God intended for me.

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Cherished

Cherished

All I ever wanted for Valentine’s Day was the one thing he could never give me. I wanted to feel completely loved and cherished, but my husband always fell short in that department. He wasn’t the kind of guy who bought flowers or gushed sentiment.

On the good days, I thought he enjoyed my company. I could be cute, sometimes, and funny. I made good deserts and edited his papers.

But other days, I wondered if he even liked me. I could be bristly, irritable, and unlovely. The deeper into love I got, the more broken I found myself to be. I couldn’t hold on to affection or warmth or tenderness—it all seemed to run out through my cracks.

Somewhere along the road, I’d been dropped a few too many times. I had learned what no one ever intended to teach me: I was not worth holding on to. I was replaceable. Forgettable. Only worthwhile as long as I was perfect and pretty, compliant and amusing, holy and willing.

When I couldn’t be all of that, well, people let go.

And I shattered.

Because I knew I was rarely perfect and hardly ever holy. Truth be told, I wasn’t even funny. I only pretended to be so I could keep people far enough away to where they couldn’t hurt me.

If I had to be all those things, who could ever love me? I learned to keep part of myself back—the part that really mattered—so when someone let go, not all of me fell.

Only, I didn’t really know it until a boy tried to love me and couldn’t. He tried to love me when I was loveable, and I wondered if I could keep it up. He tried to love me when I was un-lovely, and I didn’t believe him. He tried to be my constant, only the more constant he was, the less worthy I felt, and the more sure I was that I would mess it up.

Some nights, when sleep wouldn’t come, I would look at him and wonder if his next wife would be better. After I was dead and gone, she would love him more. She would make him happy to come home. She would make up for all these wasted years with a crazy wife who probably needed medication.

Yet all that time, I cried inside because I wanted to be that wife myself, and I couldn’t. I wanted to be the cherished one. I wanted to be the one who made his life sweet and beautiful. I wanted to be his partner, encourager, supporter—but I couldn’t seem to patch myself up long enough to hold the love it would take to be so lovely.

The truth was, love made me more uncomfortable than just about anything else in the world. I couldn’t control it, couldn’t hide from it, couldn’t keep it where it belonged. Love was wild and bold and pursuing. It overlooked brokenness and brought out beauty. I didn’t deserve that, and I knew it.

What’s more, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe anyone could overlook my flaws for long. I didn’t believe my husband could. Or my children. Or even God.

Not really.

I longed to feel cherished, but I was utterly unable to accept it. A person could wear himself out with the pouring, and I would only feel a drop of it. He could be utterly doting, head-over-heels in love, and hopelessly romantic, and it would not be enough.

The deeper into love I got, the more broken I found myself to be.

But love is relentless. And sometimes, God uses a husband’s love to soften the cracked ground so the Father’s love can soak in.

My husband did not go away.

He did not love me only when I was lovely.

He did not withdraw his love from me when I wasn’t.

So why didn’t I feel it? Why didn’t I feel cherished by a husband who cherished me?

I began to look into my heart, and the cracks began to show: I did not feel loved by my husband because I did not feel loved by God. That is something a good Christian girl was supposed to learn, and young, but I was busy learning other things.

I understood Jesus loved me enough to die for me because if there was one thing knew, it was that I was a sinner. But to understand the depth of the Father’s love, the kind of love that chose to love me in my unloveliness? That was something I simply couldn’t grasp.

And because I could not understand God’s love, I could not accept my husband’s. My husband could never love me enough.

Only God could do that.

Only God did do that.

I had been expecting my husband to meet a need in me that was never his to meet. I did not feel cherished by him because I did not understand that I was treasured by God. The deep longing in me to feel like I was worth something could never be met in the husband who married me unless it was first met in the Christ who purchased me.

That purchase had nothing to do with my worthiness or loveliness or holiness, even though I kept trying to make it so. He chose to set his affection upon me knowing full well that I was broken and wretched, unholy and imperfect. He even knew that most of his love would be wasted on me, and he loved me all the same.

There was no need to hide from that kind of love. He already knew me. He knew I wasn’t really funny, couldn’t stay pretty, and was cranky without coffee. And he decided to love me anyway. God chose to love me.

If God chose to love me, could I ever make him un-love me? Was there anything I could do to make him change his mind?

Never.

In spite of my brokenness, he would never go away.

He would not drop me when I failed.

He would not replace me with someone more lovely.

He could not because he chose not.

It was the very thing I had wanted all along, but couldn’t see that I had. I was completely accepted and loved.

I was cherished

When I understood God’s love for me and was secure in the know that I could not change it, no matter what I did, I could finally begin to see and accept that I was also loved by the man who had chosen me. All those years, when the love poured out through my cracks, and he could not make me feel loved enough, I was already chosen and loved beyond my wildest dreams.

I was cherished.

Why I Stopped Wearing My Wedding Ring

A few months into my husband’s deployment, I stopped wearing my wedding ring.

I sat on the edge of our bed with tears in my eyes and slipped it off my finger. The diamonds tossed lamplight around on the walls, and the gold felt heavy in my hand the way my heart felt heavy in my chest.

I plunked my wedding ring into the ceramic ring holder, the one that looks like a bird on a stump, the one he hates, and turned off the light.

I took off my wedding ring

Years earlier, my future husband had given me that ring as a symbol of the covenant between the two of us, the sign of a continuous, never-ending promise that nothing but death could separate.

A few months later, we stood together before an illuminated cross in the front of my church and whispered sacred vows over that ring. “For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘till death do us part…”

Those were the early days, when we talked in dreams. Everything was said that could be said, then, because it was impossible to keep it in. How deeply I loved him. How beautiful marriage was. How much we were going to do together as husband and wife. How he was handsome when he slept, and how I envied his eyelashes.

I still envied his eyelashes, but he snored now, and I burned dinner.

My ring had worn a place on my finger, a permanent indentation, white and smooth, with the years. The gold was scuffed, and I’d managed to chip a diamond. I didn’t even know you could chip diamonds, but there it was, all the same.

The love that had once been poetic had become practical: folding socks, stopping for milk, paying the phone bill, taking out the trash. He went to work. I grew babies. In the evening, we exchanged daily updates like kisses.

“The kids finished their math.”
“I have a meeting tomorrow at two.”
“Did you buy windshield wipers?”

And so it went, each day feeling more and more like we were to people occupying two separate worlds that collided only occasionally. Some days, it felt like I wasn’t married at all.

Sometimes, I felt like I was not married at all

It might have gone on that way indefinitely had he not been deployed to the other side of the world. I realized, before he left, that life wouldn’t be that much different with him gone. Not really. And that broke my heart.

The Army put an ocean between us, and more time zones than was polite. The Internet was sporadic and Skype froze his face in disturbing pixelized mutations.

We would go days without talking because it’s hard to talk over an ocean.

Over the course of days and weeks and months apart, our marriage was stripped down to the bare bones. There was nothing to hide behind: no busyness or long hours at work or a never-ending laundry pile. There was nothing to cover up the fact that we really didn’t love, honor, and cherish each other the way we set out to do.

Because you can think you’re doing okay if you can throw in a foot rub in every once in a while, and if you feel affectionate and say “I love you” a couple times a day. You can think your marriage is godly just because it’s comfortable. You can think you’re honoring your vows just because you still wear the ring.

But you can be wrong.

And both of you can feel incredibly unloved and lonely and isolated, even in the middle of a perfectly satisfactory marriage.

People were not made for satisfactory marriages, and our souls know it. Our souls are restless for the kind of intimate communion that is man and woman and the mystery of two made one.

It is why we make those vows in the first place, because our souls long to be bound by that kind of promise.

But like any good thing, it is one thing to want it, and another thing to do it.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the quiet of the night and slipped off my ring. I cried over it because I had allowed my marriage to become something so unlike what I knew it could be. I had neglected my vows.

You can think you are honoring your vows because you wear the ring

Bare faithfulness is not the same as love. Enjoying someone’s company is not the same as cherishing. Being proud of someone is not the same as honoring. All of those things were meant to be so much more, so much richer and deeper and more gospel-infused than anything I had been living for a long time.

I looked at my bare left hand and made a decision. If I was going to wear that ring, I said to myself, then I had to live the vow.

That began a ritual that has transformed my marriage. Every morning, I slip my ring on my finger and pray that God will help me to be worthy of it. Then I repeat my wedding vows to myself, thinking of specific ways I can love, honor, and cherish my husband throughout the day.

Each night, I take my wedding ring off again, hold it in my hands, and ask the hard questions. Had I faithfully kept my vows to my husband that day?

Did I put him first, after God, in my day?

Did I pray for him?

Did I make it easy for him to lead?

Did I actively support God’s calling on his life?

Did I encourage him to use his gifts, even if it meant personal sacrifice?

Did I give him my undivided attention?

Did I stop what I was doing and listen? Did I hear?

Did I uphold his reputation in the things I said about him?

Did I believe the best about him?

Did I trust him?

Did I limit my complaining and withhold criticism?

Was I thankful, appreciative, and kind?

Did I respect his hard work in the way I managed our finances?

Was I happy to see him?

Did I actively pursue ways to make him feel loved?

Was I a faithful partner in the raising of our children?

Did I uphold his authority when I parented without him?

Did I work on areas of weakness?

Did I strive to mature and grow?

Was I teachable and open to correction?

Did I recognize growth in him?

Wear the ring, live the vow

As the days passed, the vow I made on my wedding day took on more and more significance. It knit me together with my husband in ways I had longed for, but long neglected. Even with an ocean between us, I was more conscious of my commitment to him, and more focused on truly loving, honoring, and cherishing him than ever before.

And he returned the favor.

Some people say you should never take off your wedding ring. But I needed to take off my ring in order to see the significance of it. I needed to take it off to remind myself why I put it on in the first place, and what that meant for me. I needed to take off my ring to remember that wearing ring is the easy part of marriage—but it means nothing without the vows.

May I challenge you to do the same. Take off your ring. Look at it. Recite your vows to yourself and think about way to fulfill them before you slip it on again. Make each day a new commitment to love, honor, and cherish your spouse the way God intended.

Wear your ring, but live the vow.