Wife to Husband

January 31, 2014

You know how it is when you’re getting ready for bed and turning out the lights and talking about your day, you come upon reflections of past lives before your current life. Regrets and baggage that you carry with you weigh heaviest at those times. I often wonder why it’s so hard to let go of the handle.   
 
If one of you is in the midst of a crisis of self, it would be easy for the other to lift, comfort, build up, support. When you are both trapped in the past, reliving your most painful, embarrassing, heartbreaking moments, neither of you is in a place to accommodate the additional weight without drowning. 
 
We beat ourselves up with an inner dialogue that would make a sailor blush. If we spoke to our best friend the way we speak to ourselves, we’d be alone.
  
I don’t want another day to go by with my husband having even the possibly of wondering, “Did she settle?” I did not settle, in fact, he’s too good for me. I’d like to think that he’d say the exact same thing about me. He is my perfect counterpart. We are enough alike to share a sense of humor and of the absurd. We believe in serendipity. Comparatively, we have enough details and strands of self  that are different about us that we compliment and balance each other. 
 
I often say that my husband is one of the men that I judge other men by. I don’t mean that he’s perfect; it’s more that he’s perfectly flawed. His regrets and his pain remind me of the kind of man he is. His care and his attention to them remind me that he’s working on becoming a better man, for himself and for me. 
 
There have only been a few examples of this in my life. They have set a very high bar of comparison. The flaws are part of what intrigues me. It’s the way we handle the hard, heavy, bad, serious things that really tell you who a person is and what they are made of. We’ve been through death, pain, sorrow, and heartbreaks. We have lost friendships, broken promises, and we have not only survived, but we have thrived. On the other hand, we have also been through life, healing, joy, love, and new relationships. We have shared passion, for each other, for new experiences, and life. There's so much more left to do, see, experience together. Jason Lee says it best in Vanilla Sky, “You can’t have the sweet without the sour.”  
  
I often, in my darkest, heaviest, bottom of the ocean, “I can’t breathe!” moments relive the butterflies in my stomach as I waited to hear our song that would bring me down the broken road to you, the tears in your eyes, the way my hands shook. The way you held me so tightly. No, I absolutely did not settle. 
 
We truly made a covenant to each other when we said those vows. Your pain is my pain, your joy is my joy, my duck/frog is your duck/frog, but always remember that your bacon is my bacon.