The Bar is Too… Wrong.

This week is a difficult one for Jane and for me. We spent a collective 28 years growing increasingly frustrated with our exes.

I was frustrated with my ex for:

1) always sleeping in (sometimes till 1:00 p.m.)
2) insisting on regular Starbucks runs
3) drinking alcohol
4) refusing to go to church (see #1 for the usual reason) on tim
5) slowly destroying all intimacy
6) being lazy
7) not wanting homemade meals (either to make or for me to make for us, since I, a good Victorian man, am useful in the kitchen)
8) not sleeping in my arms at night
9) being angry in the mornings
10) preferring tv, movies and Facebook to walks outside or anything else outside the house

There were 100 things that would frustrate me day-to-day, as happens in so many deteriorating marriages. Why was being married so difficult with her? Why was I eternally unhappy? Why would I longingly think about international travel but have a miserable time when I tried it with my spouse? Why was I constantly feeling frustrated about wanting a healthier lifestyle but wanting it alone? Why did I
want a loving, touching, intimate relationship but feel frustrated about the complete lack thereof? Why was I complaining to God that I felt I had missed something important in life, because everything that should be fulfilling I would find absolutely unfulfilling?

The answer is: I was holding my ex to the wrong standard.

If you have read my past posts, I believe Jane and I have been intended since before the world began. If we believe in the Great Plan of Happiness, if we believe we constructed this world and planned out our lives, then Jane has always been mine. That means I had an innate sense of what I expected from my marriage, from the relationship that created my marriage, and what I was actually seeing and hoping for
was elements of the perfect relationship I was ultimately to have with Jane.

I actually feel bad for my ex now. I pressured her to be someone she isn’t, by complaining over the years about the things I expected from the relationship. My ex just wasn’t that person. While we did have happy times, and we had children together, all the little pieces weren’t there… ever. Even taking for granted that our relationship was inevitably going to divorce because of the insurmountable
differences between us, I could have made her life easier over the years by accepting her for who she was, and not trying to make her into the friend, lover, wife, and eternal Partner my Jane will be for me.

My Jane loves me. Everything I ever hoped to have with a wife, I have with Jane now. And there is no reason to expect it will magically evaporate at any point – life will only get better as I appreciate and love her for who she is more and more each day.

The lesson here is: accept your spouse for who he or she is. If your spouse is not constructed of the little pieces you expect from your eternal mate, then don’t be upset at them. They are who they are. If you need to divorce, do it. But it’s simply torture to keep pressuring someone to be a different person than God made them.

@))>---- Bingley ----<((@