Reflections on Our Eleventh Anniversary!

Today, Jamie and I celebrate 11 years of being married! I love her so freaking much. Just last week, my marriage came up naturally in a conversation with two of my students and I got emotional (i.e. I teared up in front of them) because I felt so fiercely how much I care about Jamie and how grateful I am to have experienced this journey together.

That said, our marriage wasn’t always so great. The first year was really hard! Let me explain:

First, you need to know that Jamie and I did not officially date very long at all. We had been friends as LDS missionaries and then as emailing buddies (living in different states) for about a year-and-a-half. We finally started to date while hanging out over a Christmas break from our respective universities. We dated four days before getting engaged and then were married four months later.

So, while we had been friends for a while, we didn’t date very long before getting married. I have no regrets about this choice (and there is even research which shows that time spent time is not a predictor of whether a marriage will last or not), it did come with consequences. After we got married, there were surprises. There were plenty of times when I thought that I didn’t sign up for being married to this or that aspect of my new wife.

On top of that, my personality loves possibility! And when my possibilities get limited, I often struggle with feeling confined. Making choices is hard for me because rather than focus on the good that comes from my choice, I tend to worry about missing out on all the possibilities that would have come with the other choices I could have made. This tendency was a real problem for enjoying the first year of marriage. Rather than focus on the goodness of choosing to marry Jamie, I often worried about how I was stuck with one choice and wondered about how the possibilities of marrying other people were now limited.

(BTW, I’m not proud that I felt this way. I feel very vulnerable sharing that truth but I think it is good to be vulnerable and I hope sharing this will help others.)

So, I spent the first year of marriage unhappy in many ways. You need not suppose that I was unhappy all the time. Jamie and I had lots of great experiences and growth together but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the concerns listed above continually bothered me and put a shadow over the first year of marriage.

I kept at marriage though simply because I believe in marriage. I believe that marriage is not just a legal contract but a covenant with God to stay with and love and honor my wife. So, out of love for God, I kept at the marriage in spite of my concerns. Then, some time into my second year of marriage, I had an important experience.

I decided I didn’t want to be unhappy in marriage anymore. I wanted to figure out a resolution for the doubts I was having. So, I began reading The Book of Mormon from beginning to end and highlighting every verse that taught me anything that could help me figure this out. One morning, I was reading in the book (I don’t remember where to be honest) and a thought hit me like lighting. It went something like this:

You didn’t get married to make yourself happy. You got married to make her happy.

That thought was the first marriage breakthrough and changed everything. It enabled me to forget about all the other possibilities and could have pursued, fully embrace my choice to marry Jamie, and dedicate myself to making her happy, not worrying about my own happiness. That day, I chose to change my perspective and look for ways to increase her happiness. Of course, I haven’t been perfect at always being unselfish ever since but I have worked hard to focus on putting her wants and needs before my own and really honoring the covenant I made at marriage to dedicate my life to Jamie’s happiness.

As I’ve followed through on those intentions over the ten-ish years since that breakthrough, I’ve discovered a profound, sublime, quiet satisfaction and joy in marriage. I love being married to Jamie so much and love her so much not so much because of any one moment but because I’ve made so many little sacrifices for her over the years.

Now, I must say here that I am lucky and blessed to have married someone who does not at all take advantage of my decision to put her before myself. She reciprocates it. I don’t think this principle works unless both partners in the relationship are trying to apply it. If one person is perpetually forgetting themselves to dedicate their actions to the other’s happiness and the other person never does so, it can become one sided and even abusive. This goes back to a blog post I wrote recently about the role of loving oneself which you can read by clicking here.

But in a situation where both partners forget themselves in service to the other person, trusting that the other person will serve them back, real unity and sublime joy grow. It is a wonderful thing I recommend to all. And I never would have discovered it had not my reverence for the principle of marriage moved me to stick with it through that hard year. I know many people who don’t like the idea of marriage for various reasons but I am so grateful for a covenant that moves people to stay together and figure things out so that can get through hard stuff and discover unspeakable joy at the end of the tunnel.

The Miracle of Loving Oneself

I am a big advocate for the concept of forgetting oneself and serving others. I have learned from personal experience that I am happiest when I’m other-minded. Focusing on the happiness of others has helped me overcome depression and minimize stress. My soul resonates with the exhortation of Jesus: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”.

But here’s the thing about the wording of that mandate. It says one must love one’s neighbor as oneself, no more than oneself. When I noticed this, it threw me off because I’ve been such an advocate of forgetting oneself to be other-minded. But it makes sense because my experience has also taught me that I can only love others to the degree and capacity with which I love myself.

Let me illustrate how important this is by pointing out three disastrous scenarios that come about because people try to love others without loving themselves:

Exhaustion: Too many of us try to help others without taking care of ourselves and end up getting burnt out. It’s like writing checks from an account without any money in it. The checks are impotent. Similarly, the love we try to give others is impotent if it is not backed by a full account of healthy love for ourselves. We become exhausted and are less helpful to other people because we don’t have enough self to give.

Abuse: Many abusers use the principle of “forget yourself and love your partner” to guilt the other person into sticking around and suffering the abusive relationship. This manipulation works because the promotion of “selflessness” is not being tempered with the idea of loving oneself. Thus, the beautiful principle of other-mindedness is mutated into something ugly and evil that allows the abuser to selfishly hurt others.

Incompleteness: As a high school teacher, I worry that some of the teenagers I observe enter in romantic relationships to try to complete themselves and it just doesn’t work. They end up being an emotional drain on the other person (and it’s really weird when both people are emotionally draining each other). I think it is better to be happy with ourselves and have developed a secure sense of self to the point that we have something to give to a partner rather than try to use romantic relationships to complete ourselves. For a beautiful sermon on this topic, check out Shel Silverstein’s “The Missing Piece Meets the Big O”. It’s great.

Now, I want to be really clear here that I’m not advocating for selfishness—I’m advocating for a healthy, confident love of oneself that is both a prerequisite for and a product of selflessness. And I know I just stated a contradiction. If it’s the product of selflessness, how can it also be a prerequisite for it? Does that mean we’re stuck in the plight of the young person who needs work experience to get a job but needs a job to get work experience?

Love is a transcendent principle. In fact, it is perhaps the most transcendent principle I have ever engaged with. And transcendent principles are usually rife with contradictions because they exist on a higher, spiritual plane and our intellects are limited to linear, one-thing-at-a-time processes. To a one-dimensional line, a two-dimensional circle is quite the extraordinary thing, rife with “contradictions” that defy the rules of the plane on which it exists—and imagine how both the line and the circle feel about a sphere! For us mortals existing in a one-dimensional world, so to speak, two or three-dimensional love is quite the miracle and quite the contradiction so it’s going to be hard to define and nail down at times.

But I know from experience that if we will engage with love for others and for ourselves, we will discover a completeness of love that will raise us to higher places and fill us with joy. And when we practice love for others, it will help us feel greater love for ourselves just as when we practice true love for ourselves, we’ll feel more able and willing to show love to others. If we try to love ourselves without loving others, we will probably end up in a selfish place. But, similarly, if we try to love others without loving ourselves, we’ll engage with a hollow fragment of love that will, ultimately, leave us burnt out, broken, or unsatisfied.