Grief- Loss of the Ideal Marriage
Every little girl dreams about marrying Prince Charming and having the perfect marriage. I was no exception. When I got married I knew I was the right man for me and that we would ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. The thought never even once crossed my mind that infidelity and addictions would be a part of my perfect marriage. Why would they. No person in their right mind ever thinks before they walk down the aisle, “I can’t wait unit my husband cheats on me and the has a bunch of addictions that almost destroys our marriage. That’s going to be so much fun!” Nope, that never happens.
It took me about 10 years after our marriage had fallen apart to realize that I needed to grieve the loss of my ideal marriage. I needed to allow myself to grieve the marriage I thought I had so that I could move forward in healing the marriage I now had. I am pretty sure that we can call those ten years my stage of denial. Denial mostly came in the form of me acting like we had a great marriage and we were so in love whenever we were around people. It was a time of sweeping it under the rug and not really dealing with the reality of a broken marriage. Those were definitely the darkest most hellish years of my life. Once I realized I needed to fully grieve this ideal marriage in my head I was able to move on to the next stage, which for me was anger.
Most of this anger came out towards Howie. After all, in my mind, he was the one that had hurt me the most and ruined our marriage. -Another side note.....I did come to fully realize that our broken marriage was just as much my fault as it was his. I had my own issues (co-dependency, anger, perfectionism, etc...) that took their toll on Howie and on our marriage as well. But I will save that for a later post. Side note over.- He sure did get to feel my wrath for awhile. I can honestly say that I did not keep my anger as biblical anger. I definitely allowed it to cause me to sin. That’s when I started to realize that I had some serous issues that I needed to work through along with Howie. While working through this anger stage I learned about how I was withholding complete forgiveness from Howie and in that unforgiveness I was clinging onto, bitterness brewed. Once I was able to fully forgive him, the bitterness and anger subsided and I moved forward into the bargaining and guilt stage.
Like I said before, I am the queen of “if only” and you can bet that my crown came out in full force once again for this stage of guilt. If only I was prettier, if only I was a better cook, if only I was the perfect wife, if only I was a better mom, if only if only, if only. This time I decided to throw some bargaining into the mix as well to see if that would help. God if you’ll make my marriage perfect again, I promise to never miss another Sunday at Church. God if I promise to be the perfect submissive wife will you make my marriage perfect again, please? Lots of pie crust promises, easily made, easily broken. Once again, I thought I was wiser and more powerful than God and I had some kind of control. Oh, ya, let’s add control issues to that above list of all my problems I have had to work on. The thing I cam to realize with all my bargaining with God is that He was re-working my marriage into this amazing marriage that He wanted it to be through taking away the ideal marriage I had envisioned. He was turning my marriage into a marriage that I could never had even been able to imagine. He didn’t want my unrealistic promises. He didn’t need me to be the perfect wife and most amazing cook to turn my marriage into something beautiful. He needed me to walk through this dark valley of grief along side Him so that He could sanctify me into someone who more like Him then I had ever been before. I needed the pain of a broken marriage for me to see how broken I truly was. I needed my picture of an ideal marriage to be crossed out and ripped up so that God could paint a new, better image in mind and not just the image of it but actually give the real life version of it in my own marriage. Once again, through my bargaining and guilt He was able to bring me to a place of acceptance.
Accepting the loss of the ideal marriage I had envisioned as a young girl and a young wife wasn’t that hard to do once I got to this stage because I was already experiencing a new healing marriage with Howie. I wasn’t necessarily okay with all the pain I had had to endure through the discovery and healing of a broken marriage but I did know without a shadow of a doubt that I was okay and that I was going to continue to be okay. I was able to accept this loss so much easier than any of the other losses because God had replaced it with something so much better. I do realize that He doesn’t always do that with broken marriages and so it takes longer to come to the point of acceptance. I also want to remind you that it took 15 years for me to be able to experience healing in our marriage and to experience a marriage that was better then I ever could have imagined. It wasn’t something that happened over night. It was a long process that took a lot of work on both our parts and a lot of amazing, godly people to come along side us and keep us on track. So please do not feel discouraged if you are in the process of mourning the loss of your ideal marriage and you don’t see a future with a healed marriage. For me, this process of grieving wasn’t about getting to a better marriage. It was about getting to a better me and to a place where I was okay if my marriage didn’t come back together because my relationship with Christ was so strong and I knew He would get me through anything. Acceptance for ultimately came when I chose to accept that God’s will for my life was so much better then the life I was willing for myself.