Recently I have been thinking about how far my marriage has come. There was a time when my husband and I couldn’t seem to handle allowing the other one to go off and do something without each other.
I recall the first time I wanted to attend a conference out of town with some friends. This was several years ago and it was called, “Hearts at Home.” As a mom with three young children, it sounded like the perfect opportunity to not only get away and get refreshed but empowered to come back and do my job as a wife and mom even better.
My husband reluctantly agreed. I knew deep inside he wasn’t thrilled about the idea. He even made the time leading up to it a little miserable for me. Back then I attributed it to the fact that he just didn’t want to deal with the kids. But there was almost this sense of insecurity to him.
But before you get all over him, I wasn’t much better. There were even times when I would get upset if he wanted to spend his day off golfing. I don’t know why it bothered me or why I thought it was somehow a negative thing in our marriage. But we both really struggled in this.
When spouses have a hard time allowing the other one to go off and do something, there are a number of reasons for this. It could be a lack of trust, a sense of insecurity, selfishness, or a feeling like control has been lost. The root of our problems was several of these things. Time doesn’t allow me to tell the tale but let’s just say our marriage started off on some rocky ground.
It has taken many years to build it back up. But we finally got to that point where I could spend a weekend at a women’s conference and it was no big deal. Or my husband could spend the day hanging out with his cousin, golfing or whatever else he chooses, and it’s no big deal.
What got me thinking about this are the final preparations I am making for a trip I will be taking with my sister. We are flying to North Carolina to attend a three day Christian writing conference. I have never flown anywhere without my husband and I have certainly never gone that far away from him.
So it is amazing for me to look back on where we were and how far we have come. I had my husband’s support for this from day one. It makes looking forward to this trip so much nicer.
If there is a struggle in your marriage to hang onto each other so tightly that you can’t allow the other to enjoy time without you, then something isn’t right. That actually isn’t healthy. Time apart is not a bad thing, so perhaps some looking within needs to be done to find out what the source of the angst is.
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Photo by Max van Holten in Stockvault