Practice in Marriage - 'They can't all be winners!"

Writing takes discipline.  Sometimes I have nothing to write, nothing to say.  But like anything worth doing, doing it well takes practice, lots and lots of practice.  In our culture, we don’t allow for a lot of practice, and mistake making, when it comes to the core areas of our lives.  For example, when two people get married, the expectation is that they will be happy together.  Or maybe we expect that they won’t be successful.  But there is not a language for what will really happen.  Which is that they will practice being married to one another every day.  Some days, they will do it very poorly, and other days they will do it better.  But will they say, when they hurt one another’s feelings, “I’m sorry.  I do my best to be a great partner to you, but sometimes I fail.  I’m practicing and making improvements.” Probably, they won’t.  They will be defensive, and blame one another.  That does not create an environment that inspires growth and improvement.

My husband is brilliant.  One example of his amazingness: once when we were talking about dinner, and I was saying I wanted take-out, he was explaining that we needed to dig in the cupboard because we had a lot of plans coming up, and needed to set aside some extra cash.  Obviously, this was not what I wanted to hear.  So I said, “I hate this conversation.” And he said matter-of-factly, “Well, they can’t all be winners.”

They can’t all be winners.  Marital brilliance!  This is true of days, conversations, interactions, birthday gifts, sexual encounters, weekends…the list goes on and on!  What I love about it is that is presupposed that in a functional system there will always be some amount of failure.  That is normal, to be expected, not worth overreacting to.

We know that if we want to learn to play basketball, we will spend some portion of the time standing beneath that basket, throwing the ball towards it, and missing.  Some days, we will make more of the shots than we miss. Some days we will miss more than we make. (On those days we might be a little grumpy and might even consider quitting) But hopefully, slowly, the good days will outnumber the trying days.  And then amazingly, one day, we will have a perfect day and make every shot. 

Next time your spouse makes you very very angry, remember that it is a really crappy day of practice for your spouse.  Making you angry is their failure, their row of missed shots.  And maybe, instead of explaining to them why you are RIGHT to be so angry, instead cut them some slack, and remind them that practice is hard.  Maybe that kindness will help you both hit that golden day with no missed shots.