We have just celebrated July 4th as a country. I hope you had a wonderful celebration with your family and friends.
In our last blog (What Does the Declaration of Independence Have to Do With Marriage?) I posed the question,
“What if I worked on whatever habits I have that are incompatible with love?”
Have you thought about that question this week? Richard Paul Evans discovered a question that turned his marriage around. I continue with Part 2 of his blog.
“The next morning I rolled over in bed next to Keri and asked,
“How can I make your day better?”
Keri looked at me angrily, “What?”
“How can I make your day better?”
“You can’t!” she said, “Why are you asking that?”
“Because I mean it, I said, “I just want to know what I can do to make your day better.”
She looked at my cynically.
“You want to do something? Go clean the kitchen”
She likely expected me to get mad. Instead I just nodded, “Okay.”
I got up and cleaned the kitchen.
The next day I asked the same thing.
“What can I do to make your day better?”
Her eyes narrowed, “Clean the garage!”
I took a deep breath. I already had a busy day and I knew she made the request in spite. I was tempted to blow up at her. Instead I said, “Okay.”
I got up and for the next two hours cleaned the garage. Keri wasn’t sure what to think.
The next morning came. “What can I do to make your day better?”
“Nothing!” she said. You can’t do anything. Please stop saying that.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t. I made a commitment to myself. What can I do to make your day better?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I care about you, I said. “And our marriage.”
The next day I asked again. And the next. And the next.
Then during the second week, a miracle occurred. As I asked the question Keri’s eyes welled up with tears. Then she broke down crying.
When she could speak she said, “Please stop asking me that. You’re not the problem. I am. I’m hard to live with. I don’t know why you stay with me.”
I gently lifted her chin until she was looking in my eyes. “It’s because I love you,” I said. “What can I do to make your day better?”
“I should be asking you that.”
“You should.” I said. “But not now. Right now I need to be the change. You need to know how much you mean to me.” She put her head against my chest.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so mean.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” she replied.
“What can I do to make your day better?”
She looked at me sweetly. “Can we maybe just spend some time together?”
I smiled, “I’d like that.”
I continued asking for more than a month. And things did change. The fighting stopped.
Then Keri began asking, “What do you need from me? How can I be a better wife?”
The walls between us fell. We began having meaningful discussions on what we wanted from life and how we could make each other happier. No, we didn’t solve all our problems. I can’t even say that we never fought again. But the nature of our fights changed. Not only were they becoming more and more rare, they lacked the oxygen they’d once had. We’d deprived them of oxygen. We just didn’t have it in us to hurt each other any more.
Keri and I have now been married for more than thirty years. I not only love my wife, I like her. I like being with her. I crave her. I need her. Many of our differences have become strengths and the others don’t really matter. We’ve learned how to take care of each other, and more importantly, we’ve gained the desire to do so.
Marriage is hard.
But so is parenthood and keeping fit and writing books and everything else important and worthwhile in my life. To have a partner in life is a remarkable gift. I’ve also learned that the institution of marriage can help heal us of our most unloveable parts. And we all have unloveable parts.
Through time I’ve learned that our experience was an illustration of a much larger lesson about marriage. The question everyone in a committed relationship should ask their significant other is …
“What can I do to make your life better?”
That is love. Romance novels (and I’ve written a few) are all about desire and happily-ever after, but happily-ever-after doesn’t come from desire-at least not the kind portrayed in most pulp romances.
Real love is not to desire a person, but to truly desire their happiness-sometimes, even, at the expense of our own happiness.
Real love is not to make another person a carbon copy of one’s self. It is to expand our own capabilities of tolerance and caring, to actively seek another’s well-being.
All else is simply a charade of self-interest.
I’m not saying that what happened for Keri and me will work for everyone. I’m not even claiming that all marriages should be saved. But for me, I am incredibly grateful for the inspiration that came to me that day so long ago. I’m grateful that my family is still intact and that I still have my wife, my best friend, in bed next to me when I wake up in the morning. And I’m grateful that even now, decades later, every now and then, one of us will still roll over and say, “What can I do to make your day better?”
Being on either side of that question is something worth waking up for.
(This blog post originally appeared on Richard Paul Evan’s website and then was printed April 2, 2015 in the Huffington Post)
How have you attempted to bring change to your relationship?
Are you working on what you can control…yourself… or are you still trying to force your partner to change?
Today’s blog started with this question. We would like to end with the same question…
What can I change in myself that is incompatible with Love?
Until our next Conscious Lover’s Blog…
