“And this time I trusted him and I knew he would guide me through a better story.” -
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
We fell in love long distance. He was American man in Birmingham, England. I was single mom in Portland, Oregon. We were old friends that had reconnected, our lives drastically different than when we had known each other before. He was divorced now, and I was a mom.
We began slowly flirting, oceans a part, over email. We fell in love with each other sharing our day dreams. Our individual fantasies of living a life bigger than the one either of us were currently living, began to meld. Neither of us hardly slept that summer, surviving instead on the excitement for the Indiana Jones-type adventures we would live together once we were married.
We made big, cinema-worthy, plans for our life together as husband and wife– we would make love in an Aston Martin, walk the El Camino in Spain, fly private planes, ride motorcycles and horse in South America, raise our family in Europe, dedicate time for missions trips around the globe, speak several foreign languages.
Our life was to be one big heart pumping, memory-making adventure.
We wrote an epic story of how our life together would go, even before we lived in the same town.
He quit his job in England and bought a one way ticket back to the states. He flew to meet me in Portland and even though the reality of our lives didn’t match the illusions of grandeur in our dreams, we loved one another, and believed in one another. More than anything, we believed in what life could be if we did it together.
We set off on our first adventure as a family moving to Lexington, Kentucky. By May we had bought our first house and by June we were married at the courthouse.
And then the dreams we shared for romance and adventure began getting shoved further and further away from us. Life happened. And the life that happened wasn’t exciting or romantic, or adventurous in the good ways at all.
The business start-up my husband came here for, and the ten year friendship that convinced him it was a good idea, collapsed. There was not enough money to pay our mortgage or our basic bills. There was no family within thousands of miles of us. Our son received Christmas gifts donated by the church that year.
Life was devastating and disappointing and even before our marriage became one year old, it became devastating and disappointing too.
My depression came back. Instead of supporting my husband through his job-loss, I withdrew.
I felt betrayed by God and by love.
I resented my husband and we stopped sharing our big dreams together.
Life became about survival– emotionally, financially, spiritually.
The week leading up to our one year anniversary, we barely spoke three sentences to each other. When we did speak, it was through clenched teeth and no eye contact. We had taken the United Marriage class at our church just few months before, but we had no interest in using any of the tools we had learned. The pain and disappointment in our lives was too great.
The day of our anniversary the tension in our house was so thick, I took my son to the movies alone and cried in the theater thinking about him in all of this. My husband is the only father my son has ever known and we were in the middle of the processes for him to adopt him legally.
Watching Karate Kid, I had flashes of being a single mom again, even more broken, jaded about love and life, than I was before. I didn’t want to give up on our marriage, but how could either of us keep going with it like this?
Our downward spiraling year had made a mockery out of love and it didn’t look like we would survive it as a couple.
Even though our relationship was a mess, my husband arranged for a babysitter and took me out to dinner to celebrate our marriage.
That night, in the ridiculous setting of a tropical themed restaurant in Kentucky, surrounded by tiki torches, waiters dressed like cabana boys, and people drinking piña coladas, we had our most difficult conversations ever– one that lead us almost to the brink of collapse as a couple.
It was a long night and neither of us slept well. The next morning was confusing. Did we really mean all that we said? What now? Is it over? Who have we become?
There was silence all through breakfast. We both tended to our son to avoid the other. When he left the kitchen to play in his own room, we were left only with cold coffee and the duty to face each other.
The conversation that began to unfold began, like most life-saving conversations do, with I’m sorry.
I am sorry. Three little words that, when spoken like we spoke them, gave God permission to enter again. Suddenly we weren’t two broken married people anymore, alone with our problems. Suddenly we were two broken married people being held up by the mysterious Love that sustains the universe.
Tears came from both of us. The situation was not fixed but the dialogue that happened next slowly redeemed the night, the weeks, the months before.
“Life sucks right now,” my husband offered as common ground we both could agree on.
I nodded.
“I am so sorry I brought us here,” he said, genuinely.
I cried.
He reached his hand across the table.
“I don’t want us to lose our Indiana Jones hopes and dreams,” I said, looking him in the eye for the first time all morning. “I don’t want to believe life or love is just one big disappointment. I need us believe in big, crazy dreams again.”
“I want that too.”
Our conversation lead us back to how we fell in love with each other in the beginning: sharing our dreams for romance and adventure. We as people had matured, and our dreams, tempered by a year of living in survival mode, looked slightly different too. But… the spark of sharing them was back.
“What about Grad School?” I asked him.
His eyes lit up.
“What about doing your MBA program in Spain or Argentina?” Even before I could finish the question, I could feel hope returning.
My husband felt it too. Where there was no path, suddenly there became one. A light blinked at the end of the tunnel.
“I’ve always wanted to get my MBA,” he said. And in his eyes I could read his question, “Do you really believe in me this much?”
“You can do it,” I told him. “I’ll help you. We’ll live in a tiny apartment in Madrid and we’ll follow this dream together.”
There never was such a thing as a perfect marriage, because two people who marry are never perfect. Equally so, there is no such thing as a perfect dream either, because dreams grow and evolve as we do. For all the thousands of things I have yet to learn about marriage and being a gracious and loving wife who unconditionally respects her husband, here is what I know right now and believe in my heart: sharing dreams bonds us. The bond between husband and wife is meant to grow deeper by sharing and creating new dreams. The possibility of a living romantic and adventurous life together becomes real the moment we start opening up as a couple about what it is we dream to do, see and be. And in that sharing and co-creating we learn to encourage one another, believe in one another, and fall in love with one another all over again.
