the breakdown that lead to breakthrough

We were a week in. I was on my kitchen floor, run out of tears and I thought, “I just made the biggest mistake of my life.”

Around that same time, my husband told me he’d lost all attraction to me three weeks before our wedding.

The regret and pain were overwhelming.

We had been such good friends. And we wanted with everything to follow Jesus. Couldn’t that be enough for love to grow? It hadn’t been. And I knew we would never divorce.

Now we had a hard time even being friends. I quickly lost respect for him. All of the sudden, we were totally unsafe with each other and I was being controlled; I couldn’t buy mayonnaise because it wasn’t healthy. I had to give up being on our church leadership team because he didn’t want me in leadership. 

I couldn’t share my thoughts on any topic without a melt down. There were all these hidden landmines that were impossible to decipher that ended in scary explosions or days of a cold war.

Once we had a son, we would have loud yelling matches about parenting that ended in my young son confused and scared and me crying in front of him. My husband would tell me he hated being married to me and he couldn't wait until our son grew up so he could live separately from me.

Rather than aiding each other in following Jesus, we were making it impossible for one another.

On top of that, he was not attracted to me. My life was diminishing and all my emotional energy went to just staying afloat. 

I'd spend whole days crying on and off. I couldn’t be present for my son. My sweet little boy would ask me what was wrong and I’d just have to say, “I’m sorry.”

My only option was to try to change him and that’s what I did for five years. I thought if he could see himself, we had a chance. So I would find opportunities to subtly reveal how unwise, irrational, socially unacceptable, wounded, and narcissistic he was.

I would read things on emotional healing and then share my thoughts with him. In social settings, I explained things to him, spoke for him, interrupted him, or just sweated all over when that didn’t work. I helped him understand his affects on our son in calmer moments and physically removed my son from his presence when I couldn’t restrain myself.

I was becoming someone else: yelling, begging, manipulating, hiding. I felt like a pretty good person before marriage. 

How could two people who had such good intentions end up in such a hell?

After five years, we moved to a developing country and if we had any resources for dealing with our marital strife before, they were gone in an instant. We had no friends, no family, no language with which to be understood, nothing familiar.

I was praying before sleep one night and gave it to God straight. “God, we’re actually making things worse here. If you want to do something with our lives, you have to give us the next step for our marriage.”

Right after my prayer (naturally) I turned to google and typed, “What if my husband is not attracted to me”. I really believe God answered me that night and sent a woman named Laura Doyle. And she didn't give me a workout plan or talk about lingerie. She convicted me. And she talked about intimacy skills - skills, she said, that could change everything. 

But wasn't this supposed to be fairly natural and easy if you married the right person or really loved each other? Could it be that even my situation could be affected by learning something I didn't know before? 

After just a few minutes of listening to Laura, she had taken the giant magnifying glass I had pointed at my husband for five years, and turned it on to me. For the first time in our marriage, and maybe in my life, I was able to see myself very, very clearly. I watched a flashback of the past from the first moment Samuel and I met, and it all started making sense. I had played a huge part in creating this reality.

I began to realize that my whole perspective had been a distraction: this was about me. My husband was only exaggerating a situation that had been there long before he was - the wounds and the fears and the sins, to put it simply.

I immediately felt a sense of hope. If I had been a part of creating the dynamic we were currently in, maybe, just maybe, I could change some things and create a different dynamic. I felt the power and the possibility coming back within my control. 

I was humbled greatly and my heart started warming toward him. I decided to apologize for years of disrespect. Disrespect and control of another human being that I had felt was necessary for change to happen. 

Now, I was terrified that he would think it really had all been my fault all along, but I did it anyway and it felt so good. So dignified and clean.

But he didn’t react as I would have expected after a giant apology and admission. He got silent. 

I was also practicing using "duct tape", so it got very quiet in our home for about two weeks until one day, at lunch, my big, 6’5” German husband began to cry. To weep actually. “I’m scared to let myself hope that things could get better,” he said.

I got private coaching and that’s when the next surprising thing happened: my coach, hearing about my husband, the one who was a child, who was angry and embarrassing and socially inept…my coach thought that man sounded like an amazing person. 

I was shocked…and confused. Wait, what? Do you hear what I’m saying? Somehow, she was seeing a different man than I saw. Literally. And that affected me profoundly. It opened me up to the possibility of having been at least partially wrong in my summation of my husband. I wondered: beyond just having peace, could I actually feel respect for Samuel? Could I fall in love with him?

Laura’s skills started changing me radically. I began to place reasonable doubt on my black and white perspective and in place of the regret, embarrassment, comparison, and criticism, I practiced gratitude, religiously. 

Deliberately turning my focus on to all that was going well was nothing short of a miracle. It saved me. As I did, I started finding some evidence that my husband was a pretty good man. And then, that he was a good father. I started to see some ways that he was self-controlled and able to see his errors. 

My heart was orienting itself around respect. I began to listen to Samuel deeply, without interrupting, without needing to change him, and I saw emotional safety growing at lightning speed. 

As I began to hear him all the way out, I heard things that surprised me. Things that started to make me trust him and see him as one of the saner people in my life. Things that showed me how in-tune he was socially, spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally. I remembered that I found him funny, handsome, and smart. 

Could it really be that my lack of respect and fear had skewed my vision so far as to make me think I had a fool in front of me? Through restoring respect, inwardly and outwardly, a different man started to emerge.

Then I started to experiment with relinquishing control in all areas. I relinquished control of Samuel’s moods and he started figuring them out on his own, without them turning on me. 

I relinquished control of his relationship with my son, and I saw a different father. 

I relinquished control and he stopped controlling me! I buy and eat mayonnaise constantly! He even buys it for me! Our home became peaceful, and then fun. Samuel started affirming my gifts and then supporting them.

I  got busy focusing on myself and making myself happy. I refused to blame my lack of joy or peace on anyone else. I started becoming a happy person.

I remember the moment, after just a couple months of practicing the skills, when I overheard him telling a young couple that he would like to marry me all over again; the moment when he told me I was so beautiful and he just wanted to look at me!

He loves coming home to be with me, to split a beer, to ask me about my day and tell me all about his day, to hold my hand across the table.

Our home is now light, and fun, and happy. We know how to navigate conflicts and stay connected and just do a whole lot more laughing about things. It feels so good and so much easier to be a on a team together as parents.

We can have long, intimate conversations about pretty well anything under the sun. I feel so deeply seen and heard and loved.

Do you see? As I started to change, a funny thing happened. My husband started to change. And our whole family changed. And it's still changing every day. 

It’s a journey with all kinds of terrain, and now I know what to do. My marriage is finally a source of great comfort and strength, not stress, as I seek to live the life God is calling me to. 

Our marriage isn’t perfect, but it's pretty darn good. And what seemed to be my biggest mistake, has turned into one of the greatest gifts.