Finding the Courage To Try Again

Finding the Courage To Try Again

When I read these blog posts and when I listen to my friends and when I hear stories about, well, anyone, wrestling with the divorce question, 9 times out of 10 my answer is "end it." Mostly I keep that to myself.

If I’m jaded, I’m jaded. I see no benefit in prolonging relationships which aren’t healthy or that bring more suffering than they alleviate. So we stay together because that is our tradition – marriage for life – and we believe a broken commitment is failure. For better or for worse.

Most of us meet young and marry before we are 30, we don’t know ourselves. And then we grow and change and, thank the gods, we are not the same two people who flirted and dreamed and swore till death do we part.

I look at my parents. Most of my life they haven’t even seemed to like each other. 50+ years of marriage. In moments their love is obvious, visible even in the constant ways they peck and pick at each other.

No doubt in my mind, for all the things their marriage appears to lack, they have built a bond across four children, six grandchildren, 53 years of weddings and births and deaths, depressions and bankruptcy and celebrations, hours at the little league field, graduations and awards, retirements. They have survived. Somewhere along the a deep love must have rooted.

It’s an accomplishment.

But, in all those years and all the weekend trips and week long vacations they’ve taken, my parents have never taken off for a weekend together just to be alone together. They don’t enjoy each other. They tolerate each other, sometimes barely.

What’s the accomplishment? Where’s the achievement in spending a lifetime with someone whom you’d prefer not to spend even a weekend alone?

Who might they have been apart that they weren’t together? How might they have grown and in the end how much happier might they have been?

Maybe my short view misses a point, an understanding that comes only with sticking it out. The triumph of time.

Or maybe the point of our short human lives is not to remain in relationships we’ve outgrown because we swore before God and our families it was forever. Maybe the point is to learn in this lifetime find the courage to try again.