You Should Choose a Flawed Spouse
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Are you successfully avoiding the "marital unicorn" trap?
My last post for CatholicMatch addressed four steps to finding a great spouse without wasting time—and money, and emotions—searching for the “perfect” spouse. This marital unicorn is a trap which I fell into thanks to the unrealistic nature of how many Americans view “happily ever after.”
The reverse is also true.
Nobody should “settle” in marriage. Marriage is a sacrament, not something you do with just anyone.
I hadn’t thought deeply about this difference in some time because I’m happily married. When a friend brought this up to me in April, I realized that the difference is largely a matter of intention and self-awareness.
Specifically, “settling” is admitting defeat in finding the person whom is best suited to help you get to Heaven. Conversely, actively choosing to be with another flawed human being until death do you part is a positive, life-improving choice.
Of course, the difference is often a fine line. Thus, each person in a relationship must have significant self-awareness to ensure the right decision is being made when it comes to choosing a spouse.
Allow me to share two contrasting stories.
The first comes from 2012. I was dating a woman with whom my wife and I are still friends (and whom is now happily married with two children). I had stayed the night at her parents’ house, during which time we had our first serious misunderstanding.
As we were discussing things, I said that we could probably get married. We’d have a marriage full of charity and dedication. But we’d be settling, because there was an emotional wall which we simply couldn’t get through. Love would always be an act of the will—and given the emotional barriers we later learned made us great friends but not a good couple, the other forms of love would not be very present in our relationship.
This woman agreed with me. A couple of months later, we broke up. She met her eventual husband later that year, and the rest is history.
The second story sharply contrasts with the first.
My wife and I were engaged, and she was concerned about a specific component of our relationship. I hadn’t realized that this concern was on her mind, and as we conversed it became clear that the issue was very important to her.
How did I reassure her? I used an insurance analogy.
Seriously. Of course, I also broke up with the first woman with an analogy about a graph and an asymptote…
Back to my then-fiancée. I told her that she wasn’t the top person in the world at every good thing which I saw in her. But to my knowledge, none of those people had the full package she possessed—a package which fulfilled what I needed and wanted in a spouse. It was because of that fully complementary package that I wanted only her with me.
In other words: she was the insurance policy with the full coverage, while other women were inferior marital packages that had just one or two components of what I wanted in my life.
(Okay, that reads worse than it was in the conversation. I can’t believe it reassured her as much as it did!)
In the end, we’re all imperfect. The question is not whether your spouse and your marriage will be imperfect. The question is whether you enter marriage with defeatism—by settling—or with empowerment—by finding someone with whom you can grow towards God.
Find Your Forever.
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