When I married my husband, he worked in a health food store. He ate dandelions (by choice). He went jogging barefoot (expels built-up electricity from the body). He drank huge cups of herbal tea he brewed himself. He did yoga. He used herbal oils instead of deodorant (which has aluminum in it). He brushed his teeth with baking soda (because the fluoride in toothpaste is carcinogenic). I thought, “He’ll loosen up after we’re married. I can work with this.”
When my husband married me, I worked in a floral shop, which kept me hopping all day. I kept myself going with chocolate (sugar and theobromine—can’t beat the combination). I enjoyed eating Doritos (throwback to my childhood) and all forms of fast food (comforting myself because of my childhood). I didn’t exercise (work kept me on my feet, on concrete floors, all day, and I had no energy). He thought, “I’ll get her on the right track. I can work with this.”
We’ve now been married for almost sixteen years. Guess what—he’s still a health nut, and I’m still a foodaholic. We started out with such good intentions of changing the other person, and neither of our plans met with success. Why? Because neither of us really wanted to change.
He knows he gets a little too up-in-arms sometimes, and I know I need to take better care of myself. The changes we’ve made have come from our own internal inventories and deciding for ourselves that we need to change, rather than from pressure put on us by our spouse. And that’s how all change has to happen—from the inside, because we want it. Any other change will carry with it resentment toward the person who made us change.
Are we still in love? Absolutely. In fact, we’re more in love now than we were sixteen years ago. We’ve learned that some of the things that drive us nuts about each other are also the things we love most about each other. I smile when he sits down with a huge cup of herbal tea (that looks like it was drained straight from the swamp) and he sometimes brings me a candy bar on his way home from work. And we laugh about it, and are so glad we’re together, despite our differences.
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