Radical Idea

I cried all the way through our wedding vows. And my nose ran. And I didn't have a tissue. And my maid of honor was all of 16, and she didn't realize I needed a tissue. So the most memorable moment I have from our ceremony was Don making the first of many sacrifices. During the prayer at the end of the vows, he let me wipe my nose on his suit jacket sleeve. (Ew.) To spare me from having great embarrassment before our guests. Except that the wedding video was rolling away to capture the moment forever. Hee.
No wonder that I have little real memory of the whole "in sickness and health", "for richer or poorer", and certainly I missed the "for better or worse" bit. I did catch the "to have and to hold from this day forward", and I was especially enthusiastic about the Mr. kissing his bride whose drippy nose was temporarily relieved. At twenty and twenty-one we were young... and really stupid. Which was good because our stupidity prevented us from giving up on one another and our youth left plenty of time to sort out our marriage.
I read a line in a book yesterday talking about how some kinds of love are "responsive", and I am drawn back through the haze of memory to the first three years of our marriage. Responsive love was exactly what we had signed on for, but neither of us was giving anything good to stimulate the other one on to love in response. Which means we were both miserable, and we each blamed the other. (Yeah, that helped.) I signed up for a group study thinking I would learn how to fix my clearly busted spouse at that point.
Except the other women in the room all seemed different from me. Different from any experience I had with examples of marriage. And the study was not at all what I expected. While I was ready to create my list of What's Wrong With My Husband, and it's sister How He Needs To Change, the ladies and the study all advocated something far more radical. And unappealing. They actually suggested that perhaps Don was not the Problem.