Recently Married And Learning Fast

I have been married for 2 months and a day now. I have to say that I love it. The girl that I married is so GOOD. I mean by that that she is SO pure and genuine and true. That goodness and purity inspires my love and respect for her. It also makes me uncomfortable because my shortcomings seem just a little more obvious to me around her. That idea is somewhat cliche I realize, but in my case the cliche has proven true.

We had a larger-than-usual tiff yesterday that had been building for a few days. For a while, we seemed hopelessly at odds. The annoying part was that most of the discord from both of us didn't actually come from the original disagreement, but from the fact that we were frustrated with each other about it. She might disagree with that analysis, but that is how I felt. Amazingly, we both eventually realized that we really didn't want to be mad at each other at about the same time and that made resolving the problem rather easy. And boy did we resolve it! :-)

The thing that stunned me about myself as our "fight" was progressing is that I wasn't really trying to resolve our negative feelings for each other. Instead, I was trying to defend to myself and to my wife that my position on the issue at hand was logical and more or less correct. How stupid is that! I wasn't being honest with myself about the conflict. Instead, I was just trying to vindicate the feelings that I had, so that I could maintain a lie to myself about my true intentions.

Honesty with oneself is so elusive but so liberating. I'm realizing that a majority of my actions and thoughts throughout the day are either totally or partially "dishonest" because they attempt to justify and rationalize instead of to understand, clarify and correct.

If you haven't already, read "The Bonds That Make Us Free" by Terry Warner. Those ideas that I just expressed are his. I want my life's intentions to be transparent to others as well as to myself.

So the point of this post is that, marriage is helping me to understand what true honesty to myself and others is all about. I thought I understood that before, but as I analyze my actions, I see that I can't always trust myself to tell the truth to myself. I think that realization will prove to be an important one for me personally and for our marriage.