Sometimes, I Hate His Guts

  I have a friend who says, just like the most adorable third grader you ever met, "Sometimes, I hate his guts." She is talking about her husband and she means it. Sometimes, I hate my husband's guts. I'm sure he feels the same about me from time to time but he is too good to confess it. 

  I spent several days earlier this month hating my husband's guts. He hadn't listened to me about something that I felt was important. It was also a stressful time because the kids were sick with a stomach bug. I selfishly turned it into more than it was. I pulled all the other times he hadn't listened out of my treasure box of grudges and threw them at him. I lay at night as far to my edge of the bed as possible, actively hating his guts and feeling sorry for myself. I shunned intimacy, though I craved it. He said I was acting really pregnant and that only fueled my anger. 

  Then I read a blog post that was circulating Facebook, I can't find it now, but it was a woman who had been recently widowed offering marriage advice to her daughter. It was beautiful and poetic and I cried through the whole thing. She was so wise. I imagined being in her shoes. How heartbroken I would be. How I would miss everything about my husband if he were gone. That nothing that I was upset about now really mattered in the grand scheme of life or even in the grand scheme of this week.

  I get in these ruts sometimes where something really irks me about my husband and I dwell on it and I add to it like rolling a big snowball for the base of a snowman. When I am busy rolling my snowball, it is very hard to stop. I am suddenly blinded to the positives and the negatives shine like a lighthouse. 

  You see, my husband and I are very different. Apart from Keith and me, a Proffitt and an Owen would never marry because we are so different. But, we all know that opposites attract and I fell in love with Keith for a lot of reasons but there were some specific opposites that were very attractive to me. I forget that some of things that irritate me now are the very things that caused me to fall in love with him in the first place.

  I am really in no position to offer marriage advice to anyone. The story above is an example of what not to do. I did learn that anytime I fall into this rut of begrudging my husband, it is when I am being selfish. In love, one cannot be selfish. Love is not selfish. 

1 Corinthians 13:4-5

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 

  So, basically, everything about hating his guts is wrong and here it is straight from the Bible, in a very familiar passage that we have all heard and may be able to recite. Read it again. 

  I spent the last two months helping a friend facilitate a marriage course at church because marriage matters to me. My marriage matters and I care about other people's marriages too. I want people to be happy. I want people to stay together if they can. I want children to live with both of their parents if they possibly can. A man who had participated in the course with his wife shared that they had not been living together prior to taking the marriage course and that after taking the course, his wife had decided to come home and they were experiencing healing and renewal in their marriage.

  Our own marriage was in crisis a couple of years ago. I had built a huge snowball of hurts and I was lost in the dark with only a lighthouse to show the way. The light beamed only on my unhappiness and the darkness veiled all that was good in my marriage. 

  We went to a marriage counselor. It was miserable. We sat in his office feeling like we were broken, but knowing that we weren't really broken. It was incredibly painful to share our wounds with another person, even a professional counselor. The counselor listened to our stories and advised us not to talk to each other (about issues) until the next week when we were in his office again, so we never went back. We didn't have time to wait a week between talking about issues, we had to talk immediately. We were better than this. We had to get out of crisis mode immediately.

  So we talked about everything, not just the problems that seemed so big at the time. We learned each others' fears and insecurities and renewed our love. A bottle of wine in Paris led to a real breakthrough. We discovered that an underlying problem was my parents' recent divorce. It had scared the crap out of us, and it took several glasses of wine in the City of Love to get us talking about it, a few days without our kids added to that equation too. He was afraid that I would leave him and I wondered if there really was such a thing as true love because my model had been shattered. If my parents got a divorce, it could happen to anyone. I realized that we were not immune to divorce, then I had to learn that we were not destined for it.

  I knew how much Keith meant to me and how much he means to our children, but I realized that our marriage matters to a lot of other people too. We are a unit and we have a meaningful place in our sphere of influence. If something were to happen to us, the effect would be devastating. A devastating current would wave through our selves and our families and ripple out into that sphere indefinitely. That realization was slightly burdensome but it put everything into perspective. There really isn't anything between us that would be worth setting that wave in motion.

  

  Just like any personal story I share here, I share this for the purpose of helping others. Maybe someone will read this who can relate and glean hope from my experience. Just because visiting a counselor didn't help us at the time, doesn't mean that going to a counselor would not help another. We all have unique situations and perspectives and we all require different tools to help us with our problems. I am in no way discrediting the counseling profession. It just felt really wrong to us at that time. 

 The marriage course that I referred to is the Alpha Marriage Course, an eight week video series with a workbook to go along with it. Participants sit at a small table as a couple and enjoy a candlelit dinner followed by the video lesson and built in discussion. The beauty of this format is that each couple can have complete privacy as they discuss their marriage. Keith and I participated in this course and really enjoyed it.