“Nothing can mature character,” Tim Keller said, “like marriage.” Each new day it seems begets some new and often frustrating episode that serves to aid your growth.
Marriage is two people living under one roof, learning what it means to intertwine two lives into one. It's also the perfect soil for the seeds of discord to sow the fruit of conflict. It is foolish to expect two broken and flawed people to produce anything else.
I upset and frustrated my wife daily when we first married eight years ago. To be honest with you, I still frustrate her far more than I would like. But those first few days were especially hard and upsetting for my new wife. It seemed everything I did would cause her great angst and consternation.
Yes, I was wrong and most of the difficulties were my fault. Yet, another factor was at play as well: expectations. We all hold some form of expectation about how things will go, how things will look, and what results will come. Expectations created real trouble for us early on and for the most part, we didn’t see it.
That is until we realized that expectations laid behind most of our problems. We failed to communicate them to one another and paid the price.
We expected one another to behave, think, and respond in ways neither of us could reasonably expect. In short, we were expecting the type of wisdom learned over time and experience right off the bat. We expected to jump to the end result without all the pain and hard work required to get there.
That’s part of the human story. Always desiring results without pain; success without failure. No one relishes the process. They all want to skip the line and get dessert with waiting for their turn.
Life doesn’t work that way. We have to go through the darkness to reach the light. That’s the journey we all must walk. One filled with pain, heartache, and failure.
The funny thing is that those experiences are what mold you into the person you need to be. They help you become the person who in the end meets those lofty expectations.
Live in the present and adjust your expectations. You can’t expect a result you don’t have the tools to achieve.