21 years is a long time to be married.
After being married this long, its natural to develop patterns of relating to one another. When my partner says or does this one thing, I automatically respond in a particular way, without even thinking about it. I don’t look at him, I don’t even listen all that closely to what he’s saying. We’re in a groove. It goes the same way every time, around and around and around. It’s comfortable, its predictable. But it’s not all that fun or enriching or interesting.
The reason I even noticed that this was happening was that I’ve been doing this practice called Metta lately, where you intentionally send kind thoughts to a person, like “may he be happy, may he be peaceful, may he be free from suffering.” So I was doing this toward my partner, and that’s when I started to notice that when we talked to each other, what came out of our mouths wasn’t particularly nice. There was a lot of sarcasm, a lot of trying to control him, and a lot of complaining. I was wishing him happiness and then treating him unkindly. And honestly, I did not even realize this was happening.
I told him what I was noticing about myself, and then I also noticed that when he talked to me, he was relating to me in a similar way.
But isn’t this the normal way of talking to someone? After all, this is the way many of my friends talk to each other, and also what I notice out in the world and on TV. Sarcasm is just what you do if you’re a well-educated, literate, modern person. On the whole we sound just like anyone else, an I am sure that our friends would not point us out as an example of dysfunctional behavior.
We agreed that we are going to make a break from it-from the sarcasm, from the complaining, from trying to control the other person, and from the subtle and not so subtle put downs that make up a good part of our speech, because it’s not kind, its not loving, and it doesn’t foster connection, which is after all what we are after in being married and in choosing to stay together.
Connection.
You would think after 21 years it would be easy to feel connected, but it isn’t. It takes constant practice and effort to strengthen connection, to be kind, and to be loving, because that is often not what surrounds us in the culture at large.
Here’s a poem from Hafiz:
It happens all the time in heaven
It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day
It will begin to happen
Again on earth –
That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,
And women and women
Who give each other
Light,
Often will get down on their knees
And while so tenderly
Holding their lover’s hand,
With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,
“My dear,
How can I be more loving to you;
How can I be more
Kind?”
Winter's Invitation 