Be right or be married

A heat wave has descended on the south that has taken my tired brain and cooked it to a thick curdle. For the past few days I have lulled around, moving slowly from one area of the house to another, thinking I have a lot to do, but I can’t remember what. My limbs feel swollen, my wedding band itches, my contacts stick to my eyes. When you walk outside you can’t help but close your eyes because the sun is so bright and the humidity so heavy. The pavement burns, the grass is spiky. Everything is crisping. Even our internet connection and phone line baked. Or maybe the line workers spliced our line in a heat induced daze. But today a cloud cover arrived to block some rays, and our line is back on.


All that to say that I wrote the bit that follows last week, but never got around to posting it.

The other day was our 15th wedding anniversary, an occasion worth celebrating, but since we spent part of last week in Dallas and the rest of the week entertaining 15 house guests (and being entertained by them: 9 of them were under the age of 8, so the house wasn’t as crowded as it sounds), we marked the moment without fanfare except a champagne toast after the kids were in bed – Cook’s, of course.

And then right before we went to bed, we got into an argument about the price we should settle on to sell our washer and dryer. As we went to bed, I was cataloguing the reasons to have my feelings hurt, when I remembered a great line my sister-in-law taught me this weekend: “I’d rather be married than be right.”


Gut check moment. Is a couple hundred dollars anything in comparison to fifteen years?


I’m going to make “I’d rather be married than be right” my new catchphrase as we go through the stresses of moving. I really like being right. I spend a lot of time thinking about decisions and trying to arrive at perfect answers.


And moving requires a lot of decisions to be made, which stresses me out exponentially. The calendar for May had no white space left. To the spring busyness was added the things that don’t get marked on the calendar: deadlines for making the decisions about where to live, what to do about school, what to get rid of and what to keep, phone calls to doctors, dentists and utilities, closets and files to purge, etc. (Have I complained about this before? I’ll probably will again because the decisions aren’t made yet.)

I waste a lot of time fretting about perfect answers that don’t exist.
It’s not that I intend to torture my husband with my fretting when I start to list my concerns; I just want feedback about how to figure out the best route to a perfect life. Isn’t there a formula out there for making all the kids into happy, faithful, well-adjusted adults while living a satisfying and fulfilling life in the perfect location? What if I mess up? Recent discipline issues indicate I’ve already made some bad decisions. I feel like quitting before I ruin anybody for life.


But at some point, if I want to enjoy the next fifteen years of marriage, I have to stop voicing these fears. I have to stop listening to the little demon voices of self-pity and imagined injury and stop imagining that a perfect life exists out there somewhere. I have to stop comparing the life I have to my neighbors’ and to those I read about in blogs and magazines. Instead of wishing I had someone else’s stability, property, creativity, domesticity, etc, I should instead appreciate the fact that I have a faithful, loving husband who is being incredibly patient with me as we prepare to move to a Pacific island. I have to decide to be happy to be in my story instead of wishing I were in a different one.

Hmmm. I opened up the Mother Angelica book again the other day and read this platitude: “Love is not a feeling. It is a decision. Jesus cannot command that you have a feeling. He can only command us to make a decision, and love is the greatest decision we will ever make.”


A timely reminder.


Yes, I would rather be married than be right, even if I have to turn off my complaint-o-meter. I’d rather continue to count memories than count the dollars we’ve lost on a washer and dryer. I’d rather wake up next to a warm body than a stack of books I’ll never reread. I’d rather have someone – this particular someone - remind me to say my prayers, someone to wake me up for a sunrise jog, someone with whom to share cheap champagne on our rented back patio, than a cute little house with a big garden, as appealing as it might be, because in the end, it isn’t the cute house that’s going to school me in love and understanding; it’s my husband who teaches me to see my own littleness and turn away from it, who will remind me that even if we haven’t made perfect decisions, our life is turning out to be perfectly fine because perfection only comes after refinement.  I think I married right.

So June 1 rolls around and marks not just the end of a stressful month, but the survival of our vows, another chance to quell selfishness, the gift of more days together, a renewal of the decision to love.