Gary's Simpler Marriage Letter #141 - gee, love changes

Married love got complicated while we weren't looking. Let's make it simpler again so we can love and be loved for the long term.
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50 years of marriage - so far so good! Actually it’s fantastic. But for 20 of those years I didn't realize I was unknowingly developing negative emotional reactions to Brenda and to things in our marriage. She did it too, we all do.
I ended up with a script of unhelpful automatic responses that led to some unpleasant scenes and stories. And without trying, I became a slave to my script that I didn’t even write on purpose. Then I learned I can write a new script, and that has led to more pleasant stories, and I’m still adding to it.
Each week in this little letter I'll share some of the parts of that new script.
- Gary Morland
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LESSONS LEARNED

I was in my sixties before I realized almost all marriages go through set stages.
I thought the challenges were just us!
No, Gary, these are normal major seasons that relationships go through.
People describe it differently. I’ll use some of my own terms and describe how I see it.
You probably know this. If not I hope this helps.
To me it was encouraging to realize we’re all in the same boat. Our specific experiences are unique, but the progress of love relationships are similar and predictable.
Love starts out with what I call Big Love.
Then Big Life takes over.
Then over time Real Love can begin to take over (we have a say in this last stage).

BIG LOVE
The honeymoon stage. It’s a real thing. It lasts 18 months to 3 years.
This is what a lot of people think Real Love is. I did.
Our brains get flooded with “falling in love” chemicals that don’t last. They fade over time.
Love and acceptance is easy and almost automatic. We’re super curious about each other.
We’re at our best and only see each other’s best.
We’re ignorantly blind to each other’s faults. We major on the positive because that’s mostly all we see.
We think our love is special. We think it’s different, better than our parents and family and friends. THOSE things won’t happen to us, we’ll never be like that.
It’s almost as if we’re designed to “fall in love” this way.
Because if love didn’t come easy and feel incredible at first, and if we saw too many faults, we might not get married. That’s my guess.
We fall in love, bond, and then real life is allowed to slowly drip drip drip. And sometimes big drips. And waves.

BIG LIFE
In life, we get used to everything we see and do and experience. Places, experiences, possessions, people.
It’s how life works. Nothing stays “new.” It all settles in, good and bad.
So does love and marriage.
We started out believing our love was special. We were different than everyone else.
Then we find out we’re not that much different and the same kinds of things happen to us that happen to everyone.
It can be highly disullusioning.
We can think something’s wrong with us.
Big Life is work, kids, in-laws, crises, chaos, pain, betrayal, joy, complications, hopelessness, and more.
And the dailyness of life. And time. And more time.
Big Life is where reality hits, where we see faults and get offended.
It’s hard, we take things for granted, go into auto-pilot, major on the negatives.
We start thinking negative and come to negative conclusions about the other person and we can keep those conclusions for years and years. And they can be wrong.
This is where you can put in effort yet feel it’s for nothing.
It’s also where we can fool ourselves about how much we’re contributing to our own experience.
We can get into a doom loop where each of us feels worse and worse about the other.
“If only they would change” can become our inner mantra. We never believe they could think the same thing.
All this doesn't happen to all of us. But some does to most of us.
Over time Big Love takes a backseat to Big Life. It’s normal.
But we don’t want Big Love shoved in the wayback, or in a storage unit. Or left by the side of the road.
And it doesn’t have to be. Big Life is actually part of how we get to Real Love.

REAL LOVE
Next week ?

WORTH REPEATING
“We are not always responsible for the circumstances we are in, but we are responsible for the way we allow those circumstances to affect us; we can either allow them to get on top of us, or we can allow them to transform us into what God wants us to be.” - Oswald Chambers

WORTH TRYING
To have more positive thoughts about your spouse -
Take 3 seconds and thank God for them. "Thank you Lord for Brenda."
At that point you might have an impression - thank God for WHAT about them?
Then you’ll think of something specific, and you now have a specific positive thought about them.
That’s how it’s worked for me.

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