Husband Clothes

My husband’s strengths and faults are a near perfect balance to my own. When we met 13 years ago, I was a very different person than I am now. I am absolutely positive that I would not have learned the same things from just any marriage, and I also feel that some of the tougher issues I’ve had to face with my husband are the ones that taught me the most. Actually I’m going to list things I’ve learned from my husband (which are quite complimentary to him) and others I’ve learned from marriage (which might not sound complimentary but have been critical to my growth and strength as a person):

1) Actions speak louder than words. This is a major one. My husband lives by this rule. No one can fool him. He can always spots a crook, a smoozher, a liar, but also a kind-hearted soul or person in need. He watches actions not words. I have learned to do that too, and it has made life much more predictable for me.

2) Confrontation is useless–but so is doing nothing at all. I used to confront everything. Then I realized, that’s dumb. By “confrontation,” I mean basically verbal confrontation. Problems must be solved. Injustices must be handled . But trying to solve things by verbally teaching or telling people seems very ineffective compared to the ways my husband handles things–he never confronts, yet he always “wins.”  I need a whole new post to detail how he goes about problem-solving without confrontation, but for now, suffice to say he is peaceful, and rather than trying to teach people how to be nicer to him or more fair, he just finds ways around those people (or situations). I’m not a postergirl at these methods, but I’m learning.

3) Everyone tries to do a good job, even people who fail miserably at it. That my husband feels this way makes him sound kind of soft. He’s not. He’s very stoic and unemotional. But he does have the interesting view that evilness in people is like a folly that they can’t really help…when people act evil, usually their perspective is so unhealthy that they truly have no idea they’re being evil. So, if mean or rude people could be better, they would. But since they can’t, it’s easiest to just let them be what they are (even if it’s evil) and just focus on you. (By ‘can’t’ I don’t mean they don’t have a choice. I mean for whatever reason, they don’t know how to enact that choice.)

4) Being normal is not as important as it seems. My husband doesn’t really know the basic rules–like when normal people wake up, what they eat, what they wear, and so on. So he doesn’t follow these “rules.” This used to REALLY freak me out. But I’ve realized that it’s not all about being normal. It’s about being real, which he is. I dated normal guys before I met him. They just seemed and looked normal. But they had problems that would have been really strange and irritating. (I posted about them here.)

5) Minding my own business is key. No one is ever mean to my husband. Now, part of that is probably that he looks like a rather frightening criminal. BUT the other part is that he doesn’t give people reason to bother him. He’s nice, and when friends and colleagues talk, he listens, but he never tries to impose his viewpoint. He keeps his distance, and he minds his own business. It works well for him. I’m more social than he is, but I learned from him not to focus on what other people are doing. For example, at work I used to get really irritated when people took 3 hour lunch breaks. I learned–hey, that’s not my business. And life is much easier when I don’t worry about other people’s lunch breaks. That’s the beauty of never working as a manager.

6) It’s fine when people get mad. This is a point I may have learned in any marriage since you’re bound to get mad at each other. When my husband is mad, he stays mad for a long time. Sometimes he gets mad for justifiable reasons–such as when I used to chain smoke and curse a lot–I mean, not a huge deal, but whatever, I see why changing that could be better so I did…BUT he also gets mad about really stupid stuff. Like when he somehow thinks I’m suppose to wake him up in the morning as if I’m a walking alarm clock…This is a situation where he’s mad, but I’ve done nothing wrong. In these scenarios, I learned not to care and just to let him be angry and get over it. It’s not about whether he (or any person) is mad–it’s about whether I’ve done something that’s right or wrong. If I am wrong, I try to fix it. If I did nothing wrong, I move on with my day and have fun. But before marriage, I was not able to feel at peace with this. I’m glad I learned.

Okay, I had like 10 things to list, but it’s now 1:00am. So I need to go to bed. I’m not sure I like this post. It feels rather preachy and irritating to me, but I really wanted to share things I’ve learned from my husband because there are so  many of them–and they have helped me and bettered me as a person. (Note: The next post about how I play immature mind games with my mother-in-law. Hopefully, that will remedy any unintended preachiness that is displayed in this current post.)

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