Forever bliss

Let’s talk about love. This wet Christmas season is perfect for sharing about love and marriage. This coming 8th of January will be my 6th wedding anniversary. And I have two biological products to show for it. One, a three-year old boy, and the other, a three- month old girl. Most of you guys are married with a child. Some are still single but are soon to take that life-changing step down the aisle. However you see it, marriage is one of the most important and crucial phrase of your life; next to the miracle of birth, of course. In fact, marriage inevitably means birth, usually many new births. Children are a blessing from God and the more the merrier…and also costlier. But let’s focus on the couple, and leave the blessed offspring to their own mischievous devices.

I remember the day I proposed to Anna’s parents. Yes, I proposed to the future in-laws first before I went on my knees in the middle of Sentosa bridge to ask Anna to marry me. I wrote a more than 50-page book detailing the reasons why Anna should marry me. I recited seven reasons why Anna would be happy with yours truly. They are as follows:-

1) We have a deep, pervasive sense of compassion for each other;
2) We are not only a couple, but also good friends;
3) We are emotionally ready to forsake the benefits of singlehood;
4) We do not place too much emphasis on physical compatibility;
5) We do have similar expectations;
6) We are a spiritual match; and
7) We are emotionally different but compatible.

Quite impressive, eh? My parents-in-law told Anna that they were also impressed. I was of course quite proud of the above seven neatly thought-out reasons to pursue the girl of my dream. But I remember just last month when I attended one of my friend’s weddings and Nina asked me the same question with a little twist.

Nina : So, Michael why did you marry Anna?
Michael : Her hair of course!

Suddenly, there were no seven reasons. No neatly thought-out seven reasons to impress. It was just a simple answer, “her hair.” Her long silky, jet-black hair that cascaded down to her tailbone was stunning. Before Anna got shoulder-length hair, they were long like bristles at the end of a broomstick. The attraction to me was immediate, irresistible and eye-popping. She was sixteen then and when she totted down the stairs of Amara Hotel (where we had our Sunday services) like a modern-day Rapunzel who was let out of her prison tower, I was dumbstruck. I told myself, I wanted to know her, and to know her more (sounds like the lyrics of a Christian song eh?)

Anyway, the long fairy tale story was cut short when Anna said I do, trimmed her crowning glory and became a full time housewife. My longhaired princess has become a shorthaired homemaker – no less dazzling of course.

So, that was how I met Anna. I’m sure you guys met in more favourable, dignified and noble circumstances. Maybe, Annie saw Yam Mong in a dream and Nina was praising God in a church and Daniel in white strolled over. And Mark might have sneak up to Jasmine behind the reception counter and invited her out for lunch (with ulterior motive of course, and little Dave is the incriminating evidence) but it might be a divine appointment for Mark to meet Jasmine. But my experience was simply, hair at first sight.

Regardless of how we met, I think marriage is a life-changing experience for all. Before marriage, I used to think of it as an escapade. You leave your family and cleave on to your wife. You set up a home. Sleep on a new queen-sized bed with your partner. Share meals together. Laugh in the shower. And sing out of tune and she won’t mind. Marriage is a shared world of complete privacy. Just the two of you. Two of everything. How complicated can two be? Ideally speaking, two is a very manageable number. Somehow, all things would work themselves out. The shirt would iron themselves out. The food would be on the table. The bills would be paid. The love would ooze out endlessly for you and your spouse like refillable. And marital bliss would follow and last forever. This leads me to marital myth number one: Marriage is the end of all sufferings and the beginning of bliss.

This myth leads to the most unrealistic expectation of all: Marriage will solve everything somehow. This was my expectation when I married. And reality blew its horn right smack into my ears and rudely woke me up. If anything, and to put it negatively, marriage is the start of “suffering” and the end of “bliss”. By the start of suffering, I mean the beginning of testing and the end of bliss refers to the beginning of mutual adjustments and personal sacrifices. In fact, Lewis B. Smedes makes no apology about the part suffering plays in a marriage when he unabashedly said, “Anybody’s marriage is a harvest of suffering. Romantic lotus-eaters may tell you marriage was designed to be a pleasure dome for erotic spirits to frolic in self-fulfilling relations. But they play you false. Your marriage vow was a promise to suffer. Yes, to suffer; I will not take it back. You promised to suffer with. It made sense, because the person you married was likely to get hurt along the route, sooner or later, more or less, but hurt. And you promised to hurt with your spouse. A marriage is a life of shared pain.”

On a less dramatic note, I would like to say that in a marriage, our mindset and lifestyle would definitely be transformed. The challenges that face us are too huge to comprehend all at once. Putting aside the issue of having children and planning for them, pre-children stage can be equally challenging and testing to one’s character. Shredding the mentality of single hood after marriage is not the hard part. But living together amicably, productively and progressively is. T.S Eliot once said, “Marriage is the greatest test in the world…but now I welcome the test instead of dreading it. It is much more than a test of sweetness of temper, as people sometimes think; it is a test of the whole character and affects every action.” Another saying goes, “Marriages may be made in heaven, but a lot of details have to be worked out here on earth.”

Unless you find a perfect match, expect a lot of adjustment and sacrifices in a marriage. Some habits have to be altered. Some mentality changed. And some words moderated or replaced. When differences between spouses merged in the context of everyday living, breathing and sleeping, conflict will sure to surface. My first and most enduring conflict with Anna was our own unique definition of how a house should be kept clean. My standard was close to a clean freak’s standard. Hers was on the side of can-do standard. So, when clean freak meets can do girl, expect a lot of marital blitz. Enough said.

Another source of conflict was my touch-me-not habit. I detest being touched at night when I sleep. Apart from sexual contact, all physical contact with my leg, hand, chest and head are out-of-bound. The slightest touch would distract me from my sleep like bad caffeine. Unfortunately for me, Anna was the direct opposite. She loves to engage in mischievous tickles. She tickles with her pointed index fingers and they charged at me at night, when I least expect them to and when I was most vulnerable to wild mood swings. So, when she unintentionally and playfully fiddled with my rib cage one night, I went on a warpath. I howled like a barbarian and hurled words at her in quick successive outburst. Words spoken, which I regretted terribly.

Katherine Anne Porter once said, “Marriage is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature. We must never be naive enough to think of marriage as a safe harbor from the Fall…The deepest struggles of life will occur in the most primary relationship affected by the Fall: marriage. The mature response however, when things are falling apart, is not to leave; it’s to change, ourselves.” I sincerely believe that marriage either brings out the best or the worst in us. Since marriage is the most primary relationship ordained by God and also the most intimate, we are compelled either to change to make the marriage flourish or to condemn it to fail. It is still our choice; a conscious choice.

In the midst of conflict between spouses, in the face of dealing with differences, in the context of adjusting to one another, we are confronted with choices that will determine the course of our marriage. These choices, if made, consciously right will lift our marriage to new level of maturity, passion and trust. The opposite of this is to make the wrong choices and leave the marriage in tatters over time.

Take for example, the two clients who walked into my office asking for divorce a few years ago. The first client was the wife and she came into my office alone. The other was a couple - husband and wife. My first client told me that she wanted a divorce because her husband was dead set on leaving her. When I probed further, she told me that her husband could not live with her because she was ill, very ill. Immediately after the marriage, she discovered that one of her kidneys was irreparably damaged and she had to have a transplant done immediately in China or else she would not live to see her thirtieth birthday. When her husband discovered this and knew that the financial cost involved, he consciously made the choice to divorce her. His parting shot to her before he left her was, “you are too much of a burden to me. Don’t expect me to be tied down by you at such a young age.”

My second client, a couple, was somehow different. This time the illness was on the husband. He had a terminal tumor in his head. The first thing that caught my eye when the husband lumbered into my office was that he had no hair. His eyes were tired and saggy – almost lifeless. His face ravaged and thinned. But he could still force out a smile, although a very faint one. His wife was assisting him to his seat. Her eyes were bloodshot as if she had cried a river before she came to see me. Then, after a short pause, the husband spoke, “I want a divorce.” This was quickly followed by a rejoinder from his wife, “No, I disagree.” Again I probed further and I realized that the couple could not agree. The husband was dead set on a divorce because he did not want to burden his wife. His condition was critical. He suffered extreme pain at most times. His personality had become militant sometimes, even devious. His medical bills were beyond his medisave and savings. He was no fun to live with, to put it mildly. Yet, his wife didn’t mind, not an iota. She wanted the marriage more than she wanted life itself. They have been married for many years and she was not about to give up just because her husband was ill. She made the conscious choice to stick with him through wealth and woes, through thick and sick.

In my many years of practicing family law, I have not seen a situation like this before. This couple’s love for each other is truly compelling, inspiring and very, very rare. And it was love, true love working on both sides. The husband loves the wife so much that he had to let her go. The wife loves the husband so much that she could not let go. In the end, the tug of war ended with both making the right choices. The wife refused to give up and the husband had to give in. They walked out of my office the very same way they walked in – still as much in love with each other as before – if not more.

So, daily, conscious choices make the important difference. The above examples demonstrate that a marriage can swing from one extreme to the other and the common denominator is the resolve to make choices along the marital journey and make the right one, every time.

This leads me to the second marital myth: Your wife or husband will always remain your wife and husband, no matter what. The lesson here is to not take your spouse for granted. Some of the common mentality common to spouse who takes the other for granted are:-

You will always be here for me
You will always love me
You will always be able to provide for me.
You will always be the same.
We will always be together.

We take our spouse for granted when we treat our marriage as the end of our marital journey. Once married, we deemed our goal has been achieved. The catch is complete. The girl is won. We can rest on our laurels. We can go on cruise control, autopilot and let the relationship takes its course – let the marital wind blow us to wherever the wind takes us.

After a hard-boiled day at work, we return home and give our spouse our leftovers. The leftovers of our commitment. The leftovers of our energy. The leftovers of our passion. And such leftovers generally reek of bad attitude, foul lingo and short temper. It is therefore so easy and so natural to take our spouse for granted just because she is our punching bag - always there for the first and last punch of the day.

Our mentality is such that we cannot afford to offend our boss, lest he fire us. We cannot afford to offend our colleagues, lest they ostracize us. We cannot afford to offend our relatives, lest they talk behind our back. We cannot afford to offend our friends, lest they leave us. But the situation is different for our spouse. We usually and unfortunately treat them with lesser respect, lesser sensitivity and lesser consideration. Is this right? Should we treat our spouse any lesser because they are married to us and they have nowhere to go? Should we take their feelings and wishes for granted just because ours are more important? Should we expect our spouse to acquiesce and submit all the time to us without fighting back?

My greatest fear when a spouse takes the other for granted is that this attitude, if left unchecked, will inevitably lead to apathy and apathy will most assuredly lead to death of a marriage. In fact, the opposite of biblical love isn’t hate, it’s apathy. Over time, if we continue to be blinded by our attitude and continue to give the sunset of our energy, commitment and passion to our spouse, we may become insulated from or insensitive to our spouse’s feelings, aspirations and goals and this will cause our heart to wax cold. When that happens, we become victim to what I call “emotional divorce”. We become divorce from our spouse, distancing ourselves away from her or him and allowing time to take its toll on the marriage.

I believe that marriage is a covenant of responsible love. We respond in love to our spouse. It is a response of sincerity, passion and honesty. It is a response that gives due thought and consideration for the well-being and aspirations of our partner. Roy L. Smith once said, “You get married not to be happy but to make each other happy.” A marriage is headed for disaster if one party is always happy and the other is miserable. Worse still, the happiness of one party is at the expense of the unhappiness of the other.

In fact, every little thing you do for your spouse counts and goes a long way over time to strengthen the marriage. Nothing should be taken for granted. The little things really do make the big difference. These are a few “little things” that are very do-able without much effort on your part:-

1. Saying “hello” to her and kiss her in the morning;
2. Say “goodnight” to her;
3. Sometimes bring her home a pretty flower or leaf;
4. Call her during the day and ask, “How’s it going?”;
5. Put a candle on the dinner table and turn off the light…;
6. Hold her when you are watching TV with her;
7. Leave her a surprise love note;
8. Take a shower or bath with her when the kids are out;
9. Kiss and touch her when you leave for work;
10. Tell her about your best experience during the day;
11. Tell her she is nice to be around;
12. Praise her in front of the kids;
13. Ask her how you can pray for her.

The above reminds me of a powerful saying about marriage, which says, “Marriage is an opportunity to learn how to love. Marriage is a gift. Marriage is not an event, it is a way of life.” I see marriage as going to school sometimes. For newly wed, they are just starting classes. For the married middle- agers, they are in college. For the married retirees, they are attending tertiary institution. Fortunately, there is no graduation ceremony for married couples. In the school of love, graduation comes upon death. Only in death, and only when we find that we are still married to the first girl or boy we kissed, are we truly sages in the field of marriage.

Learning to love is a daily affair, requiring daily effort and demanding daily consistency. Zig Ziglar once commented, “Love must be chased after, pursued relentlessly, aspired to, and practiced always. Love is the heart that moves. Love moves away from the self and toward the other.” That is to say, the courtship doesn’t end with marriage – it only shifted to a different gear.

It is this unquenchable desire to know and please the other more than the desire to please oneself is love made perfect in us. This of course begs the question, “is her joy my joy?” “Her pain my pain?” “Is her aspiration mine?” There is a beautiful saying that goes, “A man and woman should choose each other for life for the simple reason that a long life is barely enough time for a man and woman to understand each other and to understand is to love.” I think this quote captures the heart of the matter. And the heart of the matter is simply the matter of the heart. Just like a lover pursues his lover before marriage, a husband pursues his wife after marriage, and vice versa. The pursuit is relentless, jealously reserved for the one goal of knowing her more, and knowing her more is ultimately loving her more.

The third and final marital myth is: I have found my perfect match in my spouse. I don’t believe in the perfect match. No two persons are perfect for each other. Nobody is perfect. There is no such thing as a perfect match. Sooner or latter, all imperfections surface out of a marriage when the “great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.” The secret is not to strive for perfection in oneself (an impossible goal), but to strive for it together as a couple. Love at first sight is just that, it is just the first sight - on second glance, the flaws glare.

At this juncture, Zig Ziglar’s next quote strikes a resounding chorus with me, “if you treat the wrong person like the right person, you could well end up having married the right person after all. On the other hand, if you marry the right person and treat that person wrong, you certainly will have ended up marrying the wrong person. I also know that it is far more important to be the right kind of person than it is to marry the right person. In short, whether you married the right or wrong person is primarily up to you.” You can’t get any clearer than that. The bottom line goes way back to that day you take your marriage vows before a crowd of witnesses and before God. It all starts with that very day. Once the vows are taken, it remains a vow for life. It is therefore not a question, like an afterthought or hindsight, is she or he the right person for me? The question should rightfully be rephrased, “Can I be the right person for her?” It is an inward looking, soul searching, introspective question, and it starts with you, not her. It is not what she can offer you; it is what you can offer her.

Gary and Betsy Ricussi, expert marriage counselors and authors, have this to say, “One of the best wedding gift God gave you was a full length mirror called your spouse. Had there been a card attached, it would have said, “here’s to helping you discover what you’re really like!” Successful married couples grow together because they learn from each other. The need for change for the better is always reflected in our “the other half”. Sometimes, we are so blinded by our ego or pride that it takes our spouse to turn us around or set us on the right path. Our spouse and partner is our guide and corrector.

I believe in the permanence of marriage. This means that once married, always married. And in order to stay happily married, we must be committed to personal growth. H. Norman Wright, a marriage guru, said, “Commitment is more than maintaining: it is more than continuing to stick it out with a poor choice of a spouse. Commitment is investing – working to make the relationship grow.” Most of my clients who seek for a divorce are unable to commit to investing in their marriages. They suffer from what I termed “flight syndrome”. They take flight if things don’t go the way they want. They bail out when they start comparing their spouse with younger, sexier and prettier looking alternatives. They scamper at the slightest marital derailment.

The sad thing is that marriages fail not because of a wrong match, but because of a wrong act. They fail to turn a negative into a positive. They fail to live up to the marriage vows. They fail to stick to it regardless, in spite, nevertheless.

In the end, marriage requires a radical commitment to love your spouses as they are, while
longing for them to become what they are not yet. Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another’s glory or toward degrading each other. If you treat a man as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become the bigger and better man.

A marriage based on furthering your own interest and your own interest alone is doomed to fail. Looking for number one means that your wife becomes a distant number two. Remember, the saying, “God took woman from man’s side for a purpose. Not from his head, so that she might lord over him, or from his feet, so that he could trample on her, but rather from his side, from underneath the protective position of his arms, so they could walk side by side down life’s highway. The vast majority of people do not enter marriage with a view to becoming a servant, serving the interest of the other partner.”

So, a marriage cannot be based on feelings, but on action. Feelings fluctuate, action guarantees. Feelings change; action reaffirms. Feelings are dependable; action is anchored. When the feeling of love fades, it is the action of commitment, radical commitment that makes a crucial difference to the marriage. Let me end with this heart warming poem that you can practice on your loved one:-

“Sweetheart, dear wife, my closest friend,
With you my days begin and end.
Though times have stolen strength and youth,
It cannot change this shining truth:
Our love has lasted all these years.
While hardships came and sorrow’s tears,
We’ve met each test and gotten by,
And I will love you till I die.
We are not rich in worldly wealth.
But we owe nothing gained by stealth.
And you remain my greatest treasure, my source of pride and quiet pleasure.
I wish you all the happiness,
With which two loving hearts are blessed;
You were, and are, my choice for life,
My girl, my lady, my sweet wife.”