Belonging

I am really lucky to have met my wife at nineteen.

Rarely, at various moments over the years, I have wondered what it would have been like to have had more time for dating, for total freedom and independence, for trying on different relationship identities, and growing alone. But the truth is, when I met G, I knew within months that I wanted to marry HER and have children with HER.

G and I have been really different people from the start. We shared a complimentary sense of humor, some common core values, and a few similar interests (a love of water perhaps the most critical), but our families of origin, our life experiences, our theological understandings, our educational interests and histories, our hobbies and likes, our approaches to everything from money to goal setting, and even the music we listened to most were vastly different.

Over the years, we've had many jokes about how different we were when we met. We used to say that if we had met just a few years earlier, we might not have even liked one another, let alone fallen in love. For a while, I joked that my family must be paying G to date me.

Now, over a decade later, G and I have found that while we've grown together in many ways, we've also grown in very different directions. We share more in common now, but this is largely because we've built a life together. As individuals, sometimes we have wondered if now we have less in common than when we met.

I no longer see many commonalities as necessary to a deeply fulfilling marriage. Not a day has gone by since the day I met G when she hasn't helped me in some way to grow as a human being. I am a very different person than I was at nineteen, not in spite of my marriage, but because of it.

More than anything, what I find in my marriage, is a "deep knowing." G knows me as fully as a human being as probably anyone ever will, and she chooses love. There is something that is deeply fulfilling in receiving true-knowing followed by true, authentic, willing love. In my marriage, in my home, in the family G and I have created together, I belong. That's a feeling unlike any other...belonging.

I am starting to think most people spend their lives in various emotional and mental states that relate to belonging. And starting to think that one of our spiritual tasks is finding a sense of peace in an eternal belonging.