Growing up on Love Stories

We traveled recently to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.

Fifty years!

It was also the week we watched The Odyssey. And somewhere between watching my parents celebrate five decades together and watching Odysseus fight his way home to Penelope, I found myself thinking about the stories we grow up believing about love.

I grew up believing marriage was romance. Marriage was a sacrifice.

It was Dad and Mom. Paris and Helen. Odysseus and Penelope. The brave, brilliant hero and the beautiful, devoted woman who stood by him. 

The man who fought the battles. The woman who waited.

I took those stories seriously.

Perhaps too seriously. Because I have been married twice.

My first marriage was abusive. I was cheated on, hit, emotionally and financially broken, and failed in ways I didn’t know a person could fail another person.

And I stayed. For longer than I should have. Because somewhere in my head, the morals of those stories confused love with endurance. Sacrifice with commitment. Staying with strength.

The morals of those stories confused love with endurance.
Sacrifice with commitment. Staying with strength.

I thought that if you loved someone enough, you stayed. That if you were patient enough, forgiving enough, perhaps the person would eventually become the hero you had imagined.

Mine didn’t. Most don’t. 

My second marriage is different.

I have been loved here. Respected. Cherished. Stood by. Not perfectly. Not always gracefully. But deeply. And that distinction has taught me more about love than every story I read as a child.

Marriage is not about finding the hero.

There isn’t one.

Adulting with Love

Watching The Odyssey as an adult, I saw how much we simplify these stories for children.

Odysseus, the revered and just man, warned his prey with the strum of his bow when he hunted. All our lives, we believed that Odysseus – the smart, brilliant, strong, gorgeous man – through his wit and bravery, returned home, winning many a battle and challenge. 

But then you grow old. The heroes come off the pedestal and we see the human they are. We saw Odysseus, capable of extraordinary courage and extraordinary selfishness. This same man used his connivance and sent a horse as a gift to the goddess Athena to destroy Troy — and without warning. He broke things. Most of all, the law of Zeus, that he stood by and protected all his life. His choices hurt humans and Gods alike.

Then there was Penelope. She wasn’t simply the helpless woman who waited. She was a woman making her own choices, fighting culture, expectation and pressure to remain loyal to the man she loved.

And Helen and Paris? Not another great love story. Mere pawns in politics and trade.

Marriage and growing older together have a similar effect: they remove rosy lenses.

In the beginning, you choose EACH OTHER over everything…your families, your histories, sometimes even yourselves. And then life happens. Children. Parents. Careers. Money. Exhaustion. Old wounds. New responsibilities.

With time and relationships, the person who once put you above everything starts putting everything else before you. And sometimes, without even realising it, you do the same.

That is where marriage actually begins.

Not the wedding. Not the vows. It is a series of choices, which include painful disappointments. It also includes laughter and joy at jokes that only the two of you get, built on a life together.

Marriage is the ability to look at the person who has hurt you. And even as you sort out your anger, you try to understand if and why they are hurting, too.

I know how wronged I feel when my partner lets me down. And I can also see how my partner may feel wronged by something I’ve done. Both can be true. Both are. That is a difficult lesson. But that is marriage for you.

Our priest said something during the anniversary sermon. Women are constantly taught about sacrifice — give more, adjust more, forgive more, hold the family together. But love cannot survive on one person’s sacrifice. Human love has limits. Perhaps that is where grace comes in.

The truth is, your partner will fail you. They will disappoint you. They will break your heart.

And you will do the same.

I know this because I have lived both sides of it. I have known what it is to be hurt by the person who was supposed to protect me. And I have known what it is to be loved by the person who does.

I wish the little girl I was had known some of this. I wish we taught our boys as much about sacrifice and grace. I wish she knew that marriage is a constant choice.

That love isn’t measured by how much pain you can tolerate. That sacrifice isn’t the same as self-erasure. That leaving and staying can both be acts of love.

Today, I don’t want the perfect hero. I don’t want the perfect marriage.

I want the man who sees me as I am. And I want to see him the same way… his brilliance and his failures, his wounds and his capacity to wound, his selfishness and his generosity.

And my own.

I want to stand beside him in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse. Not because a good woman endures everything.

But because, after everything, I know what it means to choose someone.

Not happily ever after.

But the simple:

I see you.
You see me.
We will probably hurt each other.
We will disappoint each other.
We will have to choose each other again.
And again.
And again.

Not because I should. Not because it’s the right thing. But because I want to.

Perhaps that is the love story I should have grown up reading.