“I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on the earth is not a hardship but a pastime- if we live simply and wisely.” -Henry David Thoreau

We are living in anxious times. Improvements in our economy are inconsistent and our sense of security in the systems that we have long looked to for stability feels weak and fragile. There are no quick fixes for the long-term issues that have gotten us to this point and our governmental leaders are as fractured and disconnected as ever. Job security is no longer the norm, and collectively we sleep less than we ever have. Often, with nowhere else to turn, it is our closest personal relationships that bear the brunt of it all.

It is understandable that it is the places where we feel most safe that our deepest insecurities arise. I see this with my teenagers frequently; their anxiety often translates into anger or frustration, which in turn sets up my defenses and impatience. The results can be even more debilitating with my husband, where instead of practicing patience and compassion, insecurities come out in a harshness in tone of voice or short tempers. No one is to blame and yet it is often those we love most dearly who get the worst effects of our insecurity.

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“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”  -Albert Einstein

We were both thinking about time as I walked down the beach with my husband today. I was flashing on the last time we walked this same beach fifteen summers before. In Bandon, huge sea stacks mark the beaches; architecture from the sea that is unforgettable. I was remembering how small my 18- year- old son and 21- year- old daughter were on that last walk and how the beach portended the birth of my next child with dozens of embryonic looking sea shells at my feet. That baby is fourteen now.

My husband, who listens more than talks, turned to me and said, “This beach is a reservoir of time.” I looked up at him from my rambling and asked what he meant. My son says of his father, “He hardly ever talks but he is thinking all the time…” He studies things like other galaxies and looks at the world through a lens of millennia. He said, “These huge beaches are the most concrete geologic manifestations of the passage of time. The sand we are standing on is the result of millions of years of the water crashing on the earth.”

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“Marriage is not a noun; it’s a verb. It isn’t something you get. It’s something you do. It’s the way you love your partner every day.” Barbara De Angelis

I have told more people than I can count the one irreplaceable piece of advice that has kept my marriage going for decades. Sometimes, like today, I have to go inside myself with a pick axe and dig it out for me. The advice came from Bob, the best marriage counselor in Seattle, when we were just into our 7^th or 8^th year together. He said, “Mature love, the kind that outlasts the wide and frequent swing of feelings and even the painful ups and downs of cohabitation is the ability to hold what you love about someone side by side with what is most annoying about them.”

This is not that hard to do when you are feeling the love for them. It is really hard to do when all you can see is what is annoying about them. Our grievances about our partners have some weird balloon effect inside of us. As soon as we hone in on what is missing, defective, overwhelming or otherwise provokes you to want to leave the room screaming, it is hard to wrap your hands around the part of them that you love. For me sometimes, the distance is so large that for moments I wonder if the love that I hang onto is just an illusion.

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“Resistance is thought transformed into feeling. Change the thought that creates the resistance, and there is no more resistance.” -Robert Conklin

Sometimes the only way forward is through our own resistance. There is no way around it, no talking yourself out of the doubts or disbelief that the resistance embodies; you just have to trudge into the doubts inch by inch to find the edge of something a little more balanced. This was the day in a nutshell- looking for the edge of reason at work, in my marriage, and with my health.

We have been working through some challenging and inconvenient packaging issues at work that are continuously requiring hours of sorting, judging and comparing. I alternately swing between despair and determination in the process, and there are moments when my vision and aspirations are so completely blocked by the mess of the process that I can’t even identify forward motion.

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“Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown.” –Ross Perot

This week’s announcement about the end of the 40-year marriage of Al and Tipper Gore caught me off guard. I am sure I wasn’t the only one surprised by them calling it quits. They were one political couple whose mutual respect and admiration stabilized all of us through some difficult times. Despite the pressures and public viewing, their marriage seemed vital and authentic. Admittedly, any marriage always runs deeper and includes much more than what is available to its witnesses, so I have been reflecting on what happens when people quit on each other.

In part this has been on my mind as I have been experiencing my own relationship dissolution lately with a dear friend. For reasons that I don’t understand and can’t even name, she has pulled away from the relationship, clear and articulate only that the reflections I provide are not what she is wanting in her life. Ever the loveologist, I tried leaving messages of all kinds, until suddenly I stopped. I quit because the pain of rejection and all of the internal messages it triggered was too intense. It took up too much space in my heart that I couldn’t resolve. It was easier to bear the pain of loss.

Often when a relationship dissolves we look for a single event that caused the end. The truth is that even when there is a precipitating event, it is almost always the result of a long chain of minor exchanges where one partner feels dismissed or disrespected. While these moments may often go by unacknowledged, they are nonetheless recorded in the body of the relationship. It is in the smallest day to day interactions that we experience the love in our relationships, or become habitually defended to injury. It is easy to imagine in the high profile public life of the Gores, how defended, yet cordially you learn to co-exist.
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“The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through eternity.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Twenty-six years ago today was a Saturday. I know this because I was married at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Well, at least there was a young woman of 22 who was married that day. I still look vaguely like her, or at least I can remember her in me. I could not have imagined what I was saying I do to in those days. No one can. The promise to walk beside someone for better or worse, in sickness and health, for richer or poorer… how can you know what that will mean at 22, or even years later? The promise is one that you keep day by day.

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“In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.”

~Robert Sexton

As many of you know I have been married to the same man for almost 26 years. I have loved him for close to 30. Looking back to the girl that fell for him at 19, or the young woman with a pregnant belly and a resentful heart, or the more mature woman with a big family of 4 and one foot out the door, it is hard to believe that I have been all of those people with the same man and that he would still love me. That we still love after all the years of giving in, giving up and finally learning to just give is the miracle of my life.

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There are many days that being married, or rather staying married is the most challenging thing that I do. This is still true after 24 years of marriage, no less so than it had been in the early years of my marriage. What is most interesting is that the conflicts we have revolve around the same issues and although we often succeed in living them differently, when the wounds are opened again, and usually with just a single thought, the thorns cut a bit deeper each time and the climb up after the fall is a bit further each time.

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Here’s the thing about loving people: They are annoying. I tell people this regularly and they laugh, sometimes a nervous laugh, but more often a knowing laugh. We laugh together out of relief too, it’s not just you, or me, but lets face it, collectively we are all pretty annoying. A recent study of thousands of couples sited the most frequent cause of breakups and divorces were rarely about big issues, but rather the build up of small gestures or lack of them that caused people to leave their relationships. Certainly a look back through our collective human history is nothing if not a testimony to how incredibly annoying we all are- and how little things can turn bad and ugly on a big scale.

Even within our own tribes and families, our similarities and genetic ties are challenging to grasp and hang onto. With both partners and children, appreciating how we are related is something that we have to learn and re-learn. It takes separating the essential loveliness of the people around us from all of the incredibly annoying traits that fill the din. Overwhelming our sense of connection are the small things- how people chew too loudly, or swing their knees in their sleep, or drip food from the corner of their mouth, or talk while they are chewing—the noises we make when we brush our teeth, or the crumbs we leave on the counter, or the socks we can’t turn right side out. In my house these lists are infinite and trivial and weighty. Learning to sustain our relationships and choosing to stay happens in all the small moments of the everyday mess of life.

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Making time for love is an important barometer of the commitment and sustainability of your relationship. When you consider the outrageous scheduling hoops we agree to without qualm in our work setting, or even more intensely in managing our children’s activity calendar, it makes you wonder how the idea of scheduling intimacy could still be so taboo.

Yet, taboo it is, with an overriding belief that sex and intimacy are somehow tainted if they are not spontaneous and immediate. This belief system is connected to the shame and guilt we carry around from our adolescence when we could only describe a make-out session if we could first say, “I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly we were just doing it!” We can only fully embrace our sexuality if it just happens to us. Planning for it forces us to claim the most unpredictable, and to some degree uncontrollable, part of our life.

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