Often in the first few months of your relationship love can seem very effortless. You have found your dream partner and they have found their dream woman. You both find each other attractive, charming, funny, thoughtful and both your brains are overflowing with ‘opiate’ like chemicals and then one day you noticed that he frowned at something you said and they walked away from you expressing some irritation regarding whatever you said. You are shocked, hurt, dismayed. He has never once shown any irritation, never once seriously disagreed with any of your opinions. You quickly forget though because they return to to you quite quickly and apologises if they have hurt your feelings and once again the opiates kick in and everything is restored to the paradise between you.
But a few days later it happens again and this time they are much slower to apologise or maybe even unbelievably don’t apologise. You are hurt, angry, dismayed, but this time there is no restoration and it begins to dawn on you that you and your man have been evicted abruptly from Paradise.
But of course, this was bound to happen. You both come from different worlds. You were brought up in a house where no one ever openly argued, they were brought up in a house where loud disputes and arguments were the norm. The quiet introversion that you once saw as signs of a deep thinker now seem like they could be signs that they might not have many thoughts to share in that stupid head of theirs. Your extroverted vivaciousness that once amused them, now often irritates them, they now see it as empty-headed and superficial. Your opinions that they once took so seriously he now scoffs at and disagrees and their confident pronouncements about politics and religion you now see as ignorant and boorish. What has happened to the easy love that flowed between you?
The fact of the matter is that love is not easy. After the first few effortless months, it has now become a work in progress. You begin to realise if you’re wise that if this relationship is going to work it's going to require hard work; new skills; the exercising of tolerance and forbearance, a whole armoury of relational skills that you never thought you would need, to maintain this relationship you find yourself in, ‘trapped in!?’
Love is not only not meant to be easy it is meant to be a sort of furnace in which the fire slowly burns away our selfishness; our stupid destructive habits; our misconceptions and blindnesses about ourselves. Ideally, it is a furnace that gradually transforms us into better, wiser, patient, empathic mature human beings. Carl Whitaker a great therapist and hero of mine once said, ‘that the only thing worse than marriage was not being married!’
Love is or can be a wonderful thrilling often enjoyable adventure but it is also hard work. Anything worthwhile requires hard work. Love is not easy.