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Want help in staying HAPPILY glued to your stick-in-the-mud spouse?

Opposites attract. If two people just alike get married, one of you is unnecessary. ~ Larry Burkett

You’d like to travel, he doesn’t. You thrive on change, but he’s stuck like glue to what’s been done before.

You have not been thrilled with this situation.

What do you do about changing it? Can you change it?

More than once, I’ve heard my husband describe our relationship to others this way: ‘Whenever I need to know what Mel wants to do in a certain situation, I think about what I would want ~ and do the opposite.’

His words always seem to amuse those listening, but express a truth that’s been frustrating for me to live with for most of my married life.

Even when I’ve known breakup “on the grounds of incompatibility” is a crock because nobody is compatible. Nobody human, anyway.

We love, we commit, and accommodate all the incompatible bits by a continual act of our will.

However, since yesterday morning, I’m seeing things in a different way. More specifically, I’m seeing my husband in a different way.

I was in the kitchen, making coffee, and deliberating on a certain choice. All else seeming pretty much equal, I decided for option “C” since I hadn’t done it before.

Soon after, he walks in and shares with me his feelings of “trepidation” about something he was planning to do.

Why trepidation, I ask. Is it because of this or that? No, he says. I’m always uncomfortable doing something I’ve never done before. 

Wow.

Now, I already knew we had opposing opinions and preferences about so many things that matter to me, a situation I considered so unfair and limiting on my end. But, who knew he got totally stressed out just thinking about doing something new?

I didn’t.

And I saw, for the first time, what a tough time this man has had being married to me.

My husband’s brick-wall devotion all these years seems almost heroic now, seeing how my continual cheerleading for foreign travel, eating “strange” foods, and doing different things “just because” must have felt as comfortable to him emotionally as sleeping on a bed of Brillo.

We could not be more different.

I’m more certain than ever God has some wonderful purpose in this “obvious” cross-up.

Maybe I’m to take my beloved turtle of a man places he supposed to go and never would have gone without me. Maybe he is to keep his Eveready explorer bunny of a wife from wandering too far off and falling off the edge of the earth.

I don’t know, but I’m praying, “Help me to stay hopeful and hold on, LORD!”

And what about YOUR crazy “mismatch” of a marriage?

Where it seems you’ve drawn the short end of the stick on this deal with all the things you like to do and be a part of but miss out on because he doesn’t wanna . . .

Stop. Breathe. Pray. Wait.

And know today there is a Divine method in your madness, too.

Is it your “mismatch” of a marriage that needs “fixing” – or your attitude about it?