Wednesday Word Hug

Wednesday Word Hug

Wednesday Word Hug: Freedom

What I Learned from Love Warrior

I recently finished reading Glennon Doyle Melton's Love Warrior, her account of rebuilding her marriage after her husband confessed to sex addiction. (And before the recent announcement that Melton has found love with soccer star Abby Wambach.)
H'mmm...where to begin. I didn't love Love Warrior and I really wanted to. I thought it started out strong but the second half devolved into a laundry list of coping strategies that, clearly, changed her life but that seemed almost perfunctory.
Yoga: check.
Therapy: check.
Meditation: check.
Positive church community: check.
Dare I suggest that it seemed as though her heart wasn't really in it? That she was telling her story because that's what she does but that she kinda sorta wished she wasn't? In hindsight, I wonder if she knew she was leaving the marriage even then and was hoping to write another ending in real life. Who knows. And, frankly, no matter.
Because, nonetheless, there is some sound advice in Love Warrior that I think we'd do well to look at more closely. She learned valuable lessons that changed how she viewed her place in the world and, consequently, how she showed up in her marriage and that, no doubt, also gave her the clarity and courage to ultimate make the choice to leave. And whether you stay or you leave, you want to do it with as much clarity as possible. You want, as much as possible, for your response to be a choice.

Let's start with
Giving your insides a voice: Melton learns, as she's trying to find her way back to her husband, that she has spent a lifetime silencing her insides (as she refers to her inner thoughts). And I don't know about you but, wow, me too. In fact, I still do it. Maybe not as much as I used to but still...time to pay attention to that.
Case in point: My husband and I are both in the market for new vehicles. Mine has recently adopted a death rattle to let me know that it's about to start costing me a lot more money at the repair shop.
This past weekend, we visited a dealership and my husband encouraged me to test-drive a car that, I figured, was out of the price range. He makes more money than I do and I've historically deferred to his budget setting. But I drove it. And loved it. Right size. Right fuel economy. Drove like a dream.
But...I found myself afraid to say so. Money remains a point of power in our relationship. And though, intellectually, I believe that my contribution to our family – not just what I earn but the hours I put in as primary caregiver, meal-preparer, homemaker, pet carer (the list goes on. And on) – puts us on equal footing, the fact that he largely pays the bills creates feelings of disempowerment in me.
However, reading about Melton's consciousness around giving voice to her insides reminded me that I must do the same.
So I did. And now we're negotiating with the car dealership. The sky didn't fall. I didn't stutter or die of shame. Instead, I said I would really like that car if we decide we can afford it. My insides were given voice. And you know what? It feels really good. You know what else? It reminded me that, when I'm afraid to give my insides voice, it rarely has anything to do with the right now and instead is about way back when. Way back when I was told my needs weren't important. Way back when I learned, from my alcoholic mother, that wanting nice things made me selfish.
Lesson learned: Give voice to your insides. Or at the very least, challenge your thoughts about silencing them. Is it really about now? Or are you still being the good girl who doesn't want to rock the boat?

"Maybe, for now, the only right decision is to stop making decisions." There are plenty of sites out there for betrayed wives that offer up a prescription for a marriage in crisis. Some insist the only option is to dump the guy. Others push a marriage-is-sacred agenda. As you all know, I don't presume to know what's right for anyone but me (and I'm often not so sure about me). But this idea that we need to immediately do something in the wake of betrayal forces so many of us who are paralyzed by anxiety, or reeling from the shock to wonder what's wrong with us. Surely this is a no-brainer, right? We should stay. Or go. Or...something. Anything but just sit with our pain and see if the right path reveals itself with time and consideration and a gentle tending to our own hearts.
Lesson Learned: As Doyle Melton writes, "I'm trying to fix my pain with certainty, as if I'm one right choice away from relief. I'm stuck in anxiety quicksand: The harder I try to climb my way out, the lower I sink. The only way to survive is to make no sudden movements, to get comfortable with discomfort, and to find peace without answers."

"We started out as ultrasensitive truth-tellers. We saw everyone around us smiling and repeating "I'm fine! I'm fine! I'm fine!" and we found ourselves unable to join them in all the pretending." This passage stopped me cold. I know there are plenty of emotionally healthy women on this site who's husbands are less so but I cast my lot in with the ultrasensitive truth-tellers who've spent a great deal of their lives being told they're "too sensitive", that they expect "too much", that they should just sit there and look pretty and not expect anyone to care about what's going on inside. My 20s were dedicated to numbing my own anxiety with booze and a crappy boyfriend because admitting my pain sounded self-indulgent. I was a white, middle-class, university-educated woman. What did I have to feel sorry for myself about? I went to therapy, which certainly helped but I buried so much of that pain that it didn't emerge until my husband's affair. And then, it emerged with the thunderous roar of a wounded animal. All that fear – that I wasn't worth loving, that there was something wrong with me, that I didn't deserve good things to happen, that I couldn't trust anyone, that I would always be left for something/someone better – refused to stay buried any longer.
Lesson Learned: And so my healing wasn't just about my husband's betrayal, but my mother's and my father's. And, most of us, the ways in which I'd betrayed myself.

And that's the best part of Love Warrior. It's a love story to ourselves. It's about learning to value our own voice. It's about paying attention to our own hearts. It's about all the things we talk about on this site – holding ourselves with the deepest compassion.

What does Glennon Doyle Melton's divorce mean for those of us looking for healed marriages?

Glennon Doyle Melton, whom many of you know from her Momastery site and her first bestseller, Carry On, Warrior, a collection of her many incredible essays about what it means to find sobriety, to find a higher power, to find that you were enough all along, shared the truth about her husband's betrayal a few years ago.
In the time since, she has also shared a few details about their healing, a story that became her second book Love Warrior, which will be released in September.
But, just a few days ago, she shared another part of her healing journey, an unexpected and, to many, difficult piece of news. She and her husband are separating.
It can be hard for those of us hopeful that we can rebuild our marriages after betrayal to witness what we see as the failure of another couple to move past the betrayal. I know, early on after D-Day, I clung to the happily-ever-after stories. I needed desperately to believe that the path I'd chosen wasn't foolish. That it was possible to create something wonderful out of such pain.
It has been almost ten years. And while I hesitate to confess that my husband and I are ourselves going through a tough time right now, the truth is that our marriage is probably a lot like many of my friends who haven't experienced betrayal. It's got its ups and its down, its disappointments and its joys. Some days I look at my husband and wonder how we're going to make it another twenty years together (hell, I wonder how I'm going to make it to dinner without strangling him) and other days I wonder how I could ever live without him. The legacy of betrayal still rears its head now and again but mostly our challenges are more pedestrian. Disagreements over curfews for our children, frustration with who does more around the house (spoiler: it's me).
But there's no doubt that we've had to grow in order to heal from betrayal, in order to create a marriage that can weather the storms. And there have been (still are!) times when our growth doesn't keep pace with each other. Part of our most recent challenges have been around exactly that. I was worrying that he had...stalled. That his dedication to our marriage was flagging. I wondered, with little humility, if I was simply more psychologically evolved than he was. That he had reached his limit.
And then, with me handwringing that I just didn't understand why our son would behave in a certain way, he stunned me with his insight. In one simple sentence, he clarified the situation. Then he went back to watching some idiotic show on television, leaving me aware that a lot more goes on behind his brown eyes than I give him credit for.
And so I offer you this assurance. That, if you choose the path of healing and self-love post-betrayal, you're in for a brutal, beautiful journey ("brutiful", as Glennon puts it). You will change. There's no other way to reach healing. You will change in ways you can't imagine and that will alter how you show up in the world. Your partner might grow alongside you, not necessarily at the same pace and sometimes not in the same direction. Or he might choose a different path, one that leads not to growth but to a continued life in the shadows. But you, I hope, will continue to choose light. You, I hope, will keep your inner compass pointed toward the truth of yourself and your worth and knowing that you are, have always been, enough.
And so you'll be able to make your own choice about your marriage. No matter whether those around you are able to rebuild or choose to leave those marriages behind, you will be able to follow, with clarity and compassion, the path that's right for you.
It's what Glennon Doyle Melton has done. She has not betrayed those of us who've hoped that she could light the way toward a healed marriage. She has simply not betrayed herself and it is that truth that lights the way for all of us.