Wedding Wisdom

Your primary relationship starts with the one you have with yourself.

It has only been the last few years that I have given much thought to wedding season with the recent marriage of two of my children.  However, this year, wedding season started with an unexpected twist!  I was asked to conduct a wedding ceremony for a young couple in our community.  They were planning the legal ceremony the day before but wanted the celebration with family and friends to be conducted by someone who knew them and was comfortable public speaking.  Being former mayor, I fit the part.  I was delighted and honored by the request.  No big deal, I thought.  How hard it can be? … I thought.

As it turns out, it was a bit harder than I expected.  Standing in front of this jubilant couple and surrounded by their enthusiastic family and friends, I didn’t want to convey the standard adages such as: “Never go to bed angry” or “Never shout at each other unless the house is on fire” or “If you are going to fight, do it naked!”  Given the privilege of delivering the collective advice, I wanted my words to be meaningful and useful.  I also wanted my words to reflect what I truly believe: Your primary relationship starts with the one you have with yourself.

Being powerful and leading your own life is an inside job.  No external circumstance, including a relationship, is responsible for determining whether you are happy or not. We have the power to choose moment by moment how we want to be in the world, in relationship with others.  If what we are doing is not working, it is our job, and ours alone, to shift and change. 

With that in mind, I shared my three pieces of counsel:

• Always be curious about each other:

Don’t just ask questions, ask good questions with genuine curiosity.  We all have very rich lives going on inside of our heads, and we live in a world of self-generating, largely untested beliefs.  Sometimes we don’t even recognize our tendency to think “my facts are better than your facts.”  No matter what you think the other person is thinking, it is always your story you are making up.  So share your story.  Inquire about their story.  Revise your story based on the new information, because no matter how long you have been together, the danger of misunderstanding one another always exists and the birthplace of true understanding is curiosity.

• Always embrace ambiguity and risk rather than certainty and safety:

We are wired to try and make life as safe and predicable as possible.  We want our love and marriage to feel the same way: safe and predictable.  But safe and predictable keeps our lives closed off and fearful.  A life lived in love is not a safe life.  It is risky and uncomfortable.  You don’t get the delicious exhilaration without risk and discomfort.

Mary Oliver said “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters………… caution and prudence?  Fall in! Fall in!”  

Be open to falling into love and into life! Make friends with discomfort.  Its lessons in love give you a rich and full life.

• Always give to yourself what you need from the other:

We cannot give what we don’t have.  The famous love chapter from the Bible says “Love is patient…… love is kind…… love keeps no record of wrongs.”  Do you need patience?  Then be patient with yourself.  Do you need kindness? Then be kind to yourself.  Do you need forgiveness? Then forgive yourself.  It is only then that you are free to give it away because you have it to give.

Robert Fulghum said “We’re all a little weird.  And life is a little weird.  And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love.”

In the end, I humbly achieved what I wanted.  I communicated the most important ingredient for relational success; as an individual, you are solely responsible for yourself.  Although I was grateful for the post-ceremony accolades, it was the whispers of identification and nods of understanding from those long-time couples who had weathered many relational storms that really touched me.

They understood that relationships start from the inside.  That is where the power lies.