When you get married, a lot of people focus on the idea of the life you will build with your spouse. They focus on what you each bring to the marriage and how much happier you will be together. What is worth remarking on is that while a couple makes a pledge to grow old together, they do not necessarily understand that by saying grow old alongside of me, you are tacitly saying they have your permission to experience life and its changes as they happen.
I am not just talking about hairlines receding or cosmetic color changes to hairstyle. I’m talking about changes in goals, dreams and even who you are right now. When a couple gets married, they know a great deal about each other. In fact, it’s interesting for many couples that they know each other so well, so intimately in the early days of their relationship, but after years together – they don’t necessarily know each other that well.
What Happens?
Have you ever heard the phrase: familiarity breeds contempt? Truth be told, many couples who have been together for years tend to stop paying such close attention to each other. It’s not that they don’t talk, but a couple married for a decade or more tends to talk more about what needs to get done in a day than what dreams they have or what goals they are working towards.
Some sociological experts note that if you aren’t learning something new every week or two, chances are you are not paying close enough observation. How can that be? Easy, you are both paying attention to other things and not to each other. You could be focused on work, the kids, the garden, the pets or the family.
Betrayal or Boredom?
Many couples fall into a role they assign each other very early in the relationship and that’s where they stay. They don’t update each other on the changes in personal goals or desires. A profound time that this occurs in a marriage is usually after children arrive. My husband accused me of becoming such a homebody and he didn’t understand why once.
At the time, our daughter was about 2 and I remember looking at him askance. Of course, his life hadn’t changed that dramatically with the birth of our daughter. He still went to work every day. He still engaged in all the same extracurricular he had before she was born. He even still had the same hobbies.
I’d become a stay-at-home mom, going back to school to finish my degree and building my own business. Yet, he couldn’t fathom why I’d suddenly stopped wanting to go out to dinner or to a movie every other night.
What happened was that I changed and for my husband, that change was a bit of a betrayal. I’d left behind my assigned role. I became someone else. When you change, your change requires that your spouse change as well. Whether the change is huge or small, it exists. The need for the change or the lack of it, can inspire resentment on both sides of the marriage.
Permission to Change
It’s important to give each other the permission to change. It’s important to stress that change is healthy for both of you and that growing old together means just that – growth. Growth means change. You need to stay in touch with each other’s ideas, dreams and goals.
The truth is, the harder it is to change – the more you need to care and nurture for each other. Your fantasies, your fears, your insecurities, your hopes and your regrets – no matter how great or small should be shared. Trust is nurtured and maintained in healthy quantities when the people who know us best continue to love and accept us without judgment. When you know you can tell them anything and not only will they listen, they will hear you.
When you ask someone to grow old along with you – you are asking him or her for permission to change alongside him or her and you are giving him or her your permission to change too.