Making a commitment to spend a lifetime with someone else means owning up to your flaws and overcoming your fears, as you get set to journey into the future together.
This morning, as the man who makes the best tea in the world dressed for work, he asked me how he looked in a particular shirt, and I told him, honestly and with no-holds-barred. As he changed shirts, we both agreed that this was the best way to be … but it’s not something I’ve always been good at.
My future husband is going to love reading this next sentence, as I publicly admit to what has been my biggest flaw for all my life – I do not like to be wrong. It’s all got to do with my fear of disappointing someone. And, between him and I, I’d prefer not to disappoint him.
It’s something I have tried to work on over the last seven years. He noticed it long before I was willing to admit to it, and called me out on it often. Acting on it was tough, but it’s led to good things in my life. I’ve learnt how to be wrong (and enjoy the experience) in my work, and I’ve learnt how to be honest with him, which is darn important, considering that we’re committed to spending this lifetime together.
There is another flaw I don’t like to admit to: it’s the quit button. I have always had the habit of hitting that button at specific points into a life journey of some type – be it a home, friendship, relationship or otherwise. Sometimes, that button got pushed for me, and other times, I smashed it down myself. It worked much like Barney Stinson’s freeway theory:
“Relationships are like a freeway. Freeways have exits, so do relationships. The first one, my personal favourite, is six hours. You meet, you talk, you have sex, you leave while she’s in the shower. The next exits are four days, three weeks, seven months, then a year and a half, eighteen years, and the last exit, death. Which, if you’ve been with the same woman all your life, it’s like ‘are we there yet?”
That quit button has played itself out in many ways, but most notably in terms of my postal address – I’ve moved homes, at least every two years, since I officially moved out of my parents’ home, back in 2001, around the same time dinosaurs roamed the planet.
Somewhat strangely, I suppose, I approached our two-year anniversary together, a little more self-aware and didn’t feel any need to hit the quit button. I almost expected it to happen, but then suddenly we’d notched up three, four, five years together and, by the sixth anniversary, the deal was sealed. Now that the seventh marker is behind us, that anticipated seven-year itch did not come up for scratching.
Instead, that itch became something else. I mentally re-invested in my quit button, but not in relation to our life – I just started applying it to other areas of my life, using my own honest feelings on situations guide me. It made me unafraid to speak my feelings, even if it meant I feared disappointing someone.
The unexpected benefit of this has shaped up to be a life clean-up exercise. The conversations I used to fear, aren’t so frightening anymore. The way I do things has changed, and the way I feel about my life – our life – has shifted.
Just as we walked past the seven-year itch that didn’t end up being scratched, we’ll walk into the eighth year together, as husband and wife.
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