When my wife and I started dating, we heard many metaphors and illustrations about relationships.  One was of “iron sharpening iron”.  Relationships are often painful and you will have problems and numerous issues in your relationship to sort out and “work through”.  The reward is a stronger relationship with your partner.  In fact, without such work, we were told, the relationship will only be weaker in times of trial and crisis.

Since 1995, when we began dating, we never believed this and thought it was, frankly, a load of crap when people told us that we had to make our relationship work and that our relationship should be work.  It was as though not feeling the burden of work, feeling the need to make our relationship work, or that it was work or some effort that we had to expend beyond the day-to-day was a sign of weakness.  Strange we thought, that what we understood to be a rare strength in our relationship - never feeling that it was work or that we had “things” to work out - was often perceived as a weakness or a sign of being unhealthy or dishonest with each other.

As a result many thought that “we would not last”.  I was going to be a good cookie-cutter evangelical pastor and my wife had recently joined a sorority.  The pure and the impure cannot stand together is what some thought.  The effortlessness that we felt in our relationship when we were together, unbound by the expectations of others was a sign that something had to be wrong with us and that we would not last.  In fact, the only friction we have ever experienced is the undue pressure that people placed on us because we were not matching the picture of a successful relationship that so many of our friends and family assumed was a sign of goodness or God’s blessing.  Our relationship was not work even if getting people to understand our relationship was.

Today we mark 10 years since we conveyed our wedding vows to each other.  It was a day when I sat with my best man and the minister in the “upper room” and heard them discuss how difficult this was since both had been through messy divorces, my best man after he had agreed to be my best man.  I have not spoken to either of them very much since that day.  Unconsciously perhaps.  But then and there became a lasting wax seal on just how awful it was for the miserable to be around a relationship that somehow would work, without any real “work” in the sense of relationships that had been marketed to us, and had been assumed was a sign of truth.

• When we were dating we told people that it was not work for us.
• They told us, “Wait until you get engaged.”
• When we were engaged we told people it was still not work for us.
• They told us, “Wait until you get married.”
• When we were married a year we told people it was even less work than before because we were somehow validated and free to build our lives together.
• They told us, “Wait until you have been married for three years and the honeymoon is over.”
• We had our actual honeymoon at the beginning of our second year.  We got tattoos at the beginning of our fifth year symbolizing how wrong everyone had been and what we understood our identities to be at the time.  We watch many of our nay-saying friends and acquaintances go through divorces.  They were the ones living the Cinderella fantasy - work hard on your relationship and that pumpkin will turn into a chariot.  And sadly their work failed.  Yet we continued not to work and only grew closer.  We would rather carry that damn pumpkin to the top of a five story building and watch it smash to bits than wait for it to turn into a chariot.
• Then they told us, “Wait until you have kids.”
• We now have two.  Raising kids is hard work.  But our relationship is still not hard work.  It is not work at all.

We essentially raised my wife’s youngest brother through the better part of his teenage years, have had to deal with 9/11 and our respective anxiety issues, three master’s degrees, multiple moves, two house purchases, diseases, surgeries, and family issues galore (mine mostly).  Yet through all of it, and we think we have had it pretty easy, we have never “worked” on our relationship.

So I am waiting for the next stage where our relationship will be hard work and “reality” finally kicks into gear and we can have a real relationship like everyone else who works hard at it.

Nahhh.  I’d rather stay in this state of blissful ignorance of what the world expects of us for at least another decade or two…