Gratitude & Marriage …Eric

The “Key” To A Happy Relationship

Seems like a very complicated (and “loaded”) question, but it aint. Really.

Okay, suspend your disbelief for a moment and “take a walk with me”..…

What is happiness? Think about it for a bit…

To you happiness may be always travelling and seeing new places.

To that guy over there it may be always having enough of everything.

To her, it may be always having children about to watch, to hear at play.

To him it may be always having a child on his knee to read to or a dog or cat to curl up on his lap and purr and be petted while he reads a good book.

That person over there thinks a new Maserati is the answer to their dreams!

There are so many, “secrets” to a long and happy life. Some of them are even valid.

If you Google relationship quotes and anecdotes and bits of “happy” wisdom, you will find more than you have time to read. You see and hear them everywhere, and the thing is, they’re pretty much all true, to some extent.

Everything from Honor Your Father And Mother to Don’t Hit. The list goes on, probably ad infinitum.

Well, if you do go looking on the internet, and browse through a few of the tens of thousands of words of wisdom posted, you may find yourself comparing what you read to your life experiences, then coming away profoundly bewildered – disenchanted with the “wisdom” people have tried to convey to others, but have fallen so short in their attempt to do so.

Robert Fulghum gives us his own list of values which I dearly love, and which all fit right in to living a happier life:

1. Share everything.
   2. Play fair.
   3. Don’t hit people.
   4. Put things back where you found them.
   5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.
   6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
   7. Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody.
   8. Wash your hands before you eat.
   9. Flush.
   10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
   11. Live a balanced life – learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
   12. Take a nap every afternoon.
   13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
   14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
   15. Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
   16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.” 

― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Sometime, when you have the opportunity to share a long and deep conversation about life, the universe, and everything, as the outer layers gradually fall away and what is left, the core values that most of us find laid bare, are such wishes as “good health”, “comfortable prosperity” (having enough), good things for those we love and care for, etc. On the surface, happiness means something different for different people, but at the core our hopes and dreams are quite similar.

I have learned the secret to happiness. Well, okay, my own happiness, at least, and I’m going to share it with you. (How lucky you must feel! 😊)

Drum-roll please…..

Gratitude.

My profound thanks to Dennis Praeger for presenting this concept to me, which in turn led me through all that aforementioned internet excavation, and to my final realization that this truly IS the cornerstone to happiness.

Think about it awhile.

If you are appreciative and grateful for your life and everyone in it, you automatically have higher moral standards, healthy values and principles, and your inner voice, your Jiminy Cricket, becomes more Christ-like. Truer. This leads you to more love, friendship, caring, plenty, and more peace of mind. You automatically, “pay it forward” because it just makes sense to you. You automatically have, “enough” because it finally occurs to you just exactly what you truly do have. You have more contentment and peace.

REAL fundamentally profound true happiness.

You automatically “see” the good things, and the good in things, in people. You appreciate your partner, your children, your parents, your friends, and your co-workers, more than you ever imagined you would or could! Your career automatically has some amount of value to you, even if facets of it are frustrating or difficult for you to grok and you must bear down and really focus with blinders on.

Robert Fulghum’s words all make perfect sense, keeping gratitude in mind.

My beautiful wife and I occasionally play a game that helps ground us and help us to see from this perspective. If we are in traffic, or a restaurant or store or park or museum, or any situation involving people, and someone is acting out of anger or frustration or fear, etc. we make up a “reality” around that situation:

“The couple at that table seems upset with each other!”

“Oh, she’s crying!”

“He just told her he lost his job today.”

“She just found out she has cancer and she’s telling him.”

“She just told him the kids are moving back home with their three children, so he has to give up his, ‘man-cave’ for the good of the family.”

“Wow, that driver must have just gotten “the call” and he’s meeting his wife at the hospital!”

“Maybe he just lost someone he dearly loved.”

When you stop to think about what another person might be going through in their life that would cause them to behave in such a way, it is so much easier to forgive and forget and tolerate questionable behavior in others and feel grateful to have their company on this great big rock. Doing so provides you with better emotional and physical health. If you are not road-raging at the man for cutting you off (on his way to the hospital…) but instead empathizing with his plight, you are far less stressed, and so is your heart.

Ditto, relationships.

A wise man once said (oh, okay, it was Oscar Wilde), “He who takes offense when none is intended is a fool.” No fooling, right?

Well, he followed that by saying, “He who takes offense when it is intended is a bigger fool!”

Think about that one for a moment…

If your partner says something that can be taken two ways, always, always assume it is meant with the best intent. You will be far happier and your relationship will be far healthier for it, and your marriage!

It’s easy to find examples of people’s reasons (pronounced “excuses”) for negativity, for hating life. Occasionally they are even witty and clever about it, but basically the thinking is still just as toxic.

I am so incredibly thankful and grateful for all that I have! Grateful to have found my beautiful wife and to have been allowed into her life, and become a part of it. She is an amazing mother and a wonderful wife and partner. When I watch her with the kids, and the grand-kids, and the puppies, I smile at how nurturing and loving she is. When I say, “I love you!” I don’t ever say it out of habit or because it’s time, or because I should. It is not obligation or compensation. I say it to tell her my gratitude for her and thank her for letting me into her life and to tell her, once again, that I am very thoroughly grateful for her coming into mine!

She is an amazing lady, much more so than she believes. I think that is because of how others have made her feel. We all come with baggage and she and I both came from more than one failed relationship.

We learned “a thing or two” along the way.

I wish she knew how incredible she is, but then if she did, she wouldn’t be so delightfully humble. She is the girl I have been thinking of all my life, the girl I always saw in my mind when I thought of true happiness. If I could choose anyone in the universe to be mine, it would still be her! I am the luckiest man in the world and I am very, VERY aware of that fact, every moment of every day!

I am so happy because I am so grateful!

I love the way her eyes look when she looks at me, and the way my heart feels! I always want to be with her and hold her. Whenever I am not, I wish that I were.  I love just being with her and talking and cuddling, and cuddling puppies. I love sharing my thoughts and dreams with her. I honestly don’t understand how someone could not cherish her! She is the first person I think of in the morning, and the last one I think of at night. Sometimes in the middle of my day, I will miss her and listen to her voice messages just to hear her voice.

She is all my heart ever thinks about, and that is as it should be.

“I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.” – Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

If you truly, deeply love someone, you are truly, deeply grateful for them in your life.

I feel blessed and lucky in such a way that I know, deep down in my heart and soul, that my wife saved my life. So I choose to shout it out to the world, and one of the ways I do that is with a bumper sticker. It says, simply and elegantly:

My Wife, My Angel!

How could I go wrong exclaiming such an amazing fortune! But that’s not always the reaction I get. There have been two occasions, that I know of, where someone seeing my sticker called bullshit on me, or would have if I’d stopped to listen. One whom I observed in my rear view mirror, simply scoffed, rolled her eyes, and figuratively brushed my car out of her way with the wave of her hand.

I watched another as she pulled up, squinted to read it, and then started shaking her head violently from side to side and yelling at me through closed windows. The first word was easy to lip-read, “WHAT???” and the next very obviously began with a vehement “F”. From there I’m sure it got more eloquent.

I felt so sorry for those women’s lives; their experiences. They must not feel valued or appreciated.

And if I noticed two, think how many others I did not. Think how they must have been treated throughout their lives for my statement to have evoked such sad reactions. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I know that this sentiment is borne of the fact that, by and large, we just don’t “get it”, don’t understand what it really takes, truly means to enter into a marriage promise.

So many people think of marriage as just a contract, an agreement, reversible the moment one of the participants decides it’s not perfect.

THAT is the single biggest reason marriages fail.

In fact, that is begging for failure!

That is the same as saying, “I love you, but the moment I see any sign that you’re not perfect, I’m outta here!”

That is the antithesis of gratitude!

“A great marriage is not when the ‘perfect couple’ comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences.” – Dave Meurer

There are many similar mementos, relaying a similar message, that people are not perfect and the only secret to true happiness with another is to accept and relish in this fact.

Anything short of this is relationship suicide.

So many people do not learn this. So many people feel as those women mentioned above did – unappreciated  and taken for granted. Their partners came to a place where they looked and thought, “Is this all you are?” They don’t learn the value and power of gratitude. They see the other person’s flaws grow more and more glaring, and they think that person is not the right person for them.

I know I have flaws, and she tells me she does as well (though I cannot verify this firsthand). The key to our happy and “successful” marriage is that I am very grateful for her, and I am guessing that she feels a similar level of gratitude toward me as well. Our marriage is not a “contract”, but a “covenant”. A sacred promise.

We each feel lucky to have the other. That is why our relationship has worked so well, and continues to do so. We feel incredible gratitude for each other. I love her with all my heart and soul. I would marry her a hundred times over! I promise to love what I know of her, and trust in that which I do not. I look forward to the chance to grow together, getting to know the inevitably changing her, and falling in love a little more every day. I promise to love and cherish her through whatever life may bring us. I promise to be her faithful and constant best friend through good and bad, come what may. I promise to nurture and care for her through sickness and health, throughout all the seasons of our lives.