The other day my husband and I were having a conversation. We just had our first baby. He’s 3 months old, and we were acknowledging the fact that there’s been more tension in our marriage in the last 3 months than there has been in the last 5 years. Why is this?
I mean we wouldn’t be wrong in saying it’s because last year we bought a house, got pregnant, and suffered through a global pandemic that kept two extroverted individuals trapped at home with one another. We love each other, but we love hanging out with our friends. So last year alone entailed enough tension-producing events, but now with the baby, intimacy, communication, free time, sleep, and even a healthy diet are all taking a hit. So a little more tension seems expected, okay, and normal.
We wondered if ‘it is what it is!?’ Should we resign ourselves to this tense fate….We will reconvene maritally in a few years? Lol.
My husband asked a good question: How are we going to maintain passion in our marriage when we’re not able to do the things we love doing during this time? What he meant was, we love skiing, camping, hiking, traveling, exploring, and going out. These activities bring us together. You can do all of that with the kiddo, and we have, but it’s just different.
I thought about his question for a while, as it reminded me of a question I recently asked myself about my faith: If someone asked me why I believed in God, what would I say?
I would have said I believe in God because he changed my life. I believe in God because I’ve seen him perform miracles. However, while both of those statements are true, they are not irrefutable or indisputable. Someone who doesn’t believe in God could have their life changed for the better. You see it all the time with alcoholics or addicts. And miraculous events I saw could have been miracles, or they could have been really crazy-lucky occurrences/coincidences. After realizing this, I became an atheist for a week. I’m not joking. I had no answer for why I believed in God. It seemed my faith in him was based on creations but not the creator. I was miserable for a week and considered that we might actually all be like rats in some horrible lab experiment to see what people would believe in if we all think we have to believe in a greater power. I didn’t even know who to pray to anymore. It seems like some of my prayers get answered, or is it coincidence, and some don’t get answered. Or do they get answered just not in my timing or in the way I imagine? Truth be told, religion, Christianity, is in itself, pretty confusing.
I started reading Mere Christianity as I had done previously when I was an atheist to try to figure out if I wanted to believe in this God thing. I remember CS Lewis stating atheism is too simple of a belief. He goes on to state why, but I will not try to summarize his words. He does it much better than I ever could. There’s a chapter in the beginning of Mere Christianity that caught my attention. Lewis says that we can believe on authority. Meaning, not that we have seen something for ourselves, but we believe it because we believe whoever said it is true to be right. His example was he’s never been to New York or seen it, but he believes it to be a place based on authority.
That got me thinking. Could I believe in God based on authority? Could I believe in God because the Bible says He is real? Could I believe in God because Jesus, a man recognized by the secular world as much as the Christian world, said God is real?
After much deliberation and research into the man of Jesus Christ and the validity of New testament, I decided to believe again. I decided to believe that Jesus is who he said he is based on authority.
So coming full circle, I’m back to my husband’s question: how do we remain passionate in our marriage when passion seems to evade us?
The only answer I could give him was we remain passionate because we remain passionate. It’s a choice we make to remain passionate when we’re not skiing or camping or traveling or having time to communicate or make love or eat nice meals or get dressed up and go out. We choose to remain passionate or else we become maritally dry, like 50% of divorced couples who claim: “I just don’t love him anymore” or “I fell out of love with her.” As if love were a hole or trap you could fall into. I did not fall in love with my husband. I chose to love him. I choose to love him. I choose to remain passionate about him and our marriage, recalling the good times and his greatest qualities. Love is a choice. Passion is a choice. Faith is a choice not based on circumstance or feeling. It has got to be more than that or it will fail each time. The strongest bond we can create is the one we choose to.
Katie's Corner 