Two weeks into the longest vacation I’ve taken since I got married, I can already hear the anxiety in my hubby’s voice. Besides “I love you and I miss you” at the end of every phone conversation, last night my husband said to me: “Baby, I’m so bored”.
No matter how busy our days are, husbands and wives share a special space in time, that regardless of length, builds the ties of marriage. When one is single it is hard to imagine thinking about anybody else but yourself.
There is never time to think about the other’s needs when we are focused on our personal goals. Nevertheless, our days as an independent single person are numbered the moment we freely and gladly–at least in my case–say “Yes, I do”.
When I think about it I have seen many types of marriages in my life. I am the daughter of a failed one as my mother was cowardly abandoned by my father right after she got pregnant. Five years later my mom taught me what dignity meant when she answered my dad’s only phone call with the divorce papers inside a DHL envelope. But through my grandparents’ experience I learned the example of a marriage built with love and respect in life and in death, as my grandmother never remarried even though she became a widow at only 42 years old.
Years passed and you could say I became a liberal and a feminist, who saw marriage as a vain institution for women who wanted to carry someone else’s last name–either out of greed or simply laziness because they didn’t want to work. For this reason, I was in shock every time I heard that a college classmate or friend got married so young.
In my view, many girls married men that were “donkeys loaded with gold” as my wise Granny would say, with no other intellectual of physical appeal than their family fortunes.
I used to see those men as victims, but in the end, the “bitching wives” were the losers. These women paid the price of having chauffeurs and maids with sleepless nights after chasing their cheating husbands, who chased their own girlfriends.
However, a few years later my arguments against marriage crumbled like a house of cards before my eyes when I met my Prince Charming. There was a problem though; he wasn’t a knight in shiny armor riding his noble steed, but a divorced man with two kids. Against all odds, my husband and I are still those same fools who gave into the “illusion of love” and a second chance. We have managed to endure building a mixed family, survived a massive heart attack, dealt with a troubled pregnancy, and we are still raising our beautiful son. Don’t get me wrong, we want to kill each other once or twice a day; but love and respect always win.
If there is anything that the people around me have taught me is that there is no perfect marriage. Believing it exists is like believing in unicorns!
In my humble opinion that’s probably the main reason why marriages and relationships in general fail. Men and women often forget that nobody is perfect. When people say they want to marry their “ideal” partner, they are really saying that they want to marry the “idea of themselves” reflected in a mirror. And so I ask, who wants to be with someone so similar to oneself? I would have poisoned my male version at breakfast already!
The reason why my husband can put up with my craziness and stubbornness –and vice versa—is because we are flawed diverse humans; that’s the beauty of it, recognizing what we lack and being willing to learn and grow every day of our lives together.
As I write these words I can’t help but think about my husband. Yesterday, he sent me a picture of our bedroom and a few lessons came to mind. First, to my surprise he made the bed. Second, before he confessed, I knew that even though the picture didn’t show it, there was mess all over the floor. And third, I realized the emptiness he was feeling.
No matter how many rounds of golf he plays, or how much he is enjoying his “freedom” from my obsessive cleanliness, we are each other’s “toy” to amuse the boredom that life brings in itself. Now, the trick is learning how to keep the batteries always charged.
Thanks for reading and sharing.
Xiomara Spadafora
Good crazy woman 