When Your Wife Is Your Best Friend

 I have some crosses in my life, but my marriage is not one of them. If anything, my wife is my Simon of Cyrene helping me shoulder them.

I feel for people married to someone they don't like, let alone love. It doesn't give an excuse to look beyond the name on your marriage certificate to seek out the person "you're supposed to be with," but it does make life infinitely more burdensome. Even more so when you don't share a faith--not just the faith, but a common faith in something. If anything, liking the person you are married to--and continuing to do so decades into a marriage--almost trumps love in the hierarchy of needs, given how much time we spend with them. 

The chemistry of 'like' is different from the chemistry of love as well. When we fall in love, it is an inebriation of the senses, a temporary blindness to faults and imperfections, and an animalistic drive to mate. But the chemistry of like is much less tribal, more subtle. It operates on a wider swatch of synapses of factors to manage--what is your comfort level around them? Can you be yourself? Can you be honest? Can you laugh and have fun? Is it forced? Do you have to talk yourself into putting time in with them? Do you miss them when they're gone? Do you feel like you're missing a limb when they're absent? Whereas love is a conscious practice and an act of the will, like is an exercise in intuition, as well as a great and unexpeted grace. 

I like my wife, and she likes me. I don't want to go through life without her. As the sage says, "It is better therefore that two should be together, than one: for they have the advantage of their society: If one fall he shall be supported by the other: woe to him that is alone, for when he falleth, he hath none to lift him up" (Ecc 4:9-10). It is so very hard to be alone, and we should be conscious of this with those in our communities and parishes who have no one to pick them up, no one to call when their car breaks down, no one to talk about their day with. We should not bury our talents of companionship, but seek to compound them in charity. 

My wife and I have had the talk of what to do if something were to happen to either of us unexpectedly. "I want you to get remarried," my wife told me one night as we lay in bed together. "I will intercede for you from Heaven to find you a nice new wife."

"Agreed," I said. "No one will ever be able to replace you, of course. But I don't want to be alone, and we need to think of the kids as well."

"And I don't plan to remarry if anything happens to you," she said.

"Good, okay. I don't want you to get remarried anyway."

My wife and I got married later in life. I was twenty-eight when we met; she was thirty-five. We had both been in long-term relationships, were more or less established in life, and were on similar trajectories in regards to our faith. We got engaged after five months of dating, and were married a year later. My wife said she knew I was "the one" after the first date. I think it took me two or three weeks. 

When we were going through our Pre-Cana weekend, one of the activities was to stand under a sign that represented something that was most important to you. We were the only couple standing under the sign that read "PRAYER." Thankfully, that brick in the foundation has served us well. Each morning when we wake up, we go down to the kitchen table, put on a pot of coffee, and chat for a bit. Then we light a candle, bless ourselves with holy water, and pray--first with a morning offering of consecration, and then for the needs and intentions of those we know, for our priests, bishop, and the Holy Father, for our children, our marriage, and our day. We then read a short chapter from a book (usually The Imitation of Christ), and sometimes the readings for the day, followed by an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be. Then we start our day. 

When my wife is not around, I do feel a sense of incompleteness. Not in a co-dependent type of way, but that I am a player short on my team. I'm a spaz on my own, and my wife needs a push oftentimes when left to herself, but when we are together I feel whole--like we can do all things in Christ who strengthens us. 

I have been in relationships when you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop, for things to turn sour or fizzle out. That's not the case with my wife. The sacrament of Matrimony is like the activator for the epoxy--like the wind, you can't really point to it but you know that without it your foundation would start to crack without that infused grace. Marriage is a natural good, but a sacramental marriage has the goods to be an impenetrable rock of grace.

We sometimes hurt each other, but never intentionally, and usually out of tiredness or selfishness. Selfishness is the root sin in a marriage from which all the saplings of marital vice emerge. When those sprigs emerge in the soil, we usually are quick to sit down and identify them, pluck them out, and throw them in the compost before they take root too deeply. "Bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if any have a complaint against another: even as the Lord hath forgiven you, so do you also" (Col 3:13). Forgiveness in a marriage is the practice and exercise of charity in faith.

There's a touching line in As Good As It Gets when Jack Nicholson tells Helen Hunt on a dinner date, "you make me want to be a better man." That's what it means to be married to a good woman, a best friend. You want to be a better husband, a better father, a better lover, a better man because of them.

One thing I really appreciate about my wife is she's content to just be. She's a good be-er, very Type B. Our favorite thing to do together is lie in bed and talk and laugh. Sometimes we get coffee, sometimes we watch a movie, but these are ancillary activities and not necessary. I haven't gotten tired of her yet after fourteen years of marriage, and vice versa. This is proof that God is a god of miracles. 

I am also the oldest of my siblings, and she is the youngest of hers. This can create some interesting conflicts and frustrations between us, but also is a good complementary dynamic, since I take the weight of the world on my shoulders while she is used to being taken care of. So much of marriage is being willing to care for the other--in riches and poverty, in health and sickness, for better or worse. You need to be ready for that in marriage, because nothing is promised to us--not our health, not the days, not even each other's faithfulness. 

Just as Adam was charged with being the caretaker of the garden of Eden, so too when Eve was formed he was charged with being her caretaker as well. Adam and Eve were both banished from the Garden, unable to ever return--perhaps it would have been a crueler fate were one to be banished and the other remaining in Paradise. They suffered and toiled in exile, but they suffered and toiled together. How much greater then is our redemption in Christ and the restoration of our friendship with God together through the Sacrament of Baptism and Matrimony together?

Life is very hard. Marriage can make it even harder depending on who you are yoked to, but it can also be the means by which we shoulder the burdens of life in solidarity together, making them bearable. I consider this a great unmerited grace, like having a job you enjoy as well as a good boss, or the benefits of health or wealth. You're not required to like your spouse to be married...but I'm so glad I do.