If the parts on emotional interaction and vulnerability in relationships stood out to you: A great parallel podcast episode that seemed to also touch on several similar themes.
I first listened to this conversation while I was at work and had so many thoughts and feelings I had to listen to it again when I could make some notes for myself. And now, another day later, these are things that stuck with me.
"Shall we make beauty and holiness from this or shall we not?" This is the fundamental question of mortality. Are we willing to trade our ashes for beauty? Because not having ashes is not one of the available options.
Diana's raw openness about possibly having too high expectations in her twenties moved me. Life hasn't worked out the way she expected, so it's natural to wonder whether she should have done something differently.
I got married at 19 to the first man who asked. That sounds flippant. It wasn't. I had completed 3 years of college and felt like we were a good fit. It was right. 27 1/2 years later we divorced. I chose that. The marriage wasn't a healthy place for me and I had cleaned up enough of my own mess to take responsibility for making that decision.
So I bristled when I heard Sam say, "if someone's actually abusive--put the dude in jail and get the person out. At moments of intense emotional stress the lines blur." Lines blur ndeed. But it feels reductive to imply that only blatant abuse in a moment of intense emotional stress counts. How many moments of intense emotional stress are required before you get to say you've had enough, that the damage to your sense of self is so recurring that it's time to go? And does that mean you are not resilient and don't have staying power in the face of friction? Because my experience is different from Diana's. I am 53 and I absorbed the lesson that marriage was hard and my job was to make my husband's and children's lives work. My bias is that it's better to go into a marriage expecting better attention and care than that. Marriage is work, but should most of that work be trying to recover from the relationship itself?
I don't know what to make of someone saying, "I decided to divorce my wife because we couldn't have the kind of marriage you have." On the one hand, it's naive to think anyone can have the kind of marriage any other couple has. My married siblings are all pretty well partnered, and all of their marriages look different. What's similar about them is that there is room for two people to thrive as individuals. On the other hand, I actually believe it's a fair desire to have a marriage that is a place of friendship and growth. If this guy really felt like his wife wasn't invested in that endeavor and wasn't moving in that direction, he gets to want what he wants. Marriage for marriage sake is not the point. A marriage worth having is the point, and you have to be willing to create that. But I do suspect that someone making such a strange comment to another person at church may not be all that invested himself. The truth is that we, the people outside of the marriage, have no way of knowing that.
https://open.substack.com/pub/faithmattersfoundation/p/jana-spangler-how-to-stop-running
If the parts on emotional interaction and vulnerability in relationships stood out to you: A great parallel podcast episode that seemed to also touch on several similar themes.
I first listened to this conversation while I was at work and had so many thoughts and feelings I had to listen to it again when I could make some notes for myself. And now, another day later, these are things that stuck with me.
"Shall we make beauty and holiness from this or shall we not?" This is the fundamental question of mortality. Are we willing to trade our ashes for beauty? Because not having ashes is not one of the available options.
Diana's raw openness about possibly having too high expectations in her twenties moved me. Life hasn't worked out the way she expected, so it's natural to wonder whether she should have done something differently.
I got married at 19 to the first man who asked. That sounds flippant. It wasn't. I had completed 3 years of college and felt like we were a good fit. It was right. 27 1/2 years later we divorced. I chose that. The marriage wasn't a healthy place for me and I had cleaned up enough of my own mess to take responsibility for making that decision.
So I bristled when I heard Sam say, "if someone's actually abusive--put the dude in jail and get the person out. At moments of intense emotional stress the lines blur." Lines blur ndeed. But it feels reductive to imply that only blatant abuse in a moment of intense emotional stress counts. How many moments of intense emotional stress are required before you get to say you've had enough, that the damage to your sense of self is so recurring that it's time to go? And does that mean you are not resilient and don't have staying power in the face of friction? Because my experience is different from Diana's. I am 53 and I absorbed the lesson that marriage was hard and my job was to make my husband's and children's lives work. My bias is that it's better to go into a marriage expecting better attention and care than that. Marriage is work, but should most of that work be trying to recover from the relationship itself?
I don't know what to make of someone saying, "I decided to divorce my wife because we couldn't have the kind of marriage you have." On the one hand, it's naive to think anyone can have the kind of marriage any other couple has. My married siblings are all pretty well partnered, and all of their marriages look different. What's similar about them is that there is room for two people to thrive as individuals. On the other hand, I actually believe it's a fair desire to have a marriage that is a place of friendship and growth. If this guy really felt like his wife wasn't invested in that endeavor and wasn't moving in that direction, he gets to want what he wants. Marriage for marriage sake is not the point. A marriage worth having is the point, and you have to be willing to create that. But I do suspect that someone making such a strange comment to another person at church may not be all that invested himself. The truth is that we, the people outside of the marriage, have no way of knowing that.