There are new books coming out this month, and new movies, all about marriage and commitment.
Movies and books in popularity right now include topics like – Cheating on your wife with your ex-wife; finding out your husband was cheating with multiple women; marrying your husband to give him citizenship; eating, loving and praying to get over your divorce and spend your big literary advance…
All this entertainment about screwing up marriage and commitment and sex and relationships is really a deeper look at whether or not we can really make a go at this grand experiment we call LOVE.
How did it all get so complicated?
In Europe they call blended families “patchwork” families. After divorce, we remarry and bring together our children with someone else’s. This blending and sewing together of the patchwork of our lives, integrating rules and habits, affections and inconsistencies, creates more tension than we know how to handle sometimes. But we do it. Because its worth it. Because we LOVE.
So maybe we dont always get it right. Maybe we stumble, we fall, we crash into someone else’s bed. Ooops. Sometimes we committ to someone or something when we think we can and we really want to and then the reality of a real intimate relationship is so terrifying that we leap out of the frying pan as quickly as we jumped in. Sometimes its not as easy as it looked from outside. But we try. For LOVE.
I like to think that most of us wake up in the morning and think “Today I am going to do the best I can…” and we work toward that goal. Some days we feel good about it and hit the finish line and wipe our brow and say “phew – no one got hurt today – it was a good day…!”
And other days we lie awake and wonder how we screwed it up as bad as we did.
Love is a universal longing. Regardless of how often we do it poorly, or how many mistakes we make. I want to believe that our basic instinct, like survival, is to cut off our own foot sometimes in order to get out from under the rock we feel is crushing us from above.
And yes, sometimes the rock is in our heads.
For those days that you and I are dumb as rocks, I hope you have people to love you like I do. People to forgive you, and take you back. To build room for your children, to welcome you into their arms, and to understand that love forgives all things.
Good luck out there.
Its rocky.
Passionately Yours,
Dr. Tammy
Leave a Reply