Luck had nothing to do with it.

I love this phrase "Luck had nothing to do with it!" It's one that Max has used when people have said that Max and I were lucky to have found each other as mates. I've even said many times I am lucky to have Max as a husband. But I do think he's right though that luck had nothing to do with it. It's been many years in the the making. Years of learning, re-adjusting, losing my ego in the relationship, and hard work. It's not magic, yet magic begins to occur again, like in the early days of a courtship, once a couple reaching a level of committment and acceptance for the other.


First of all I remember at 16-years-old really getting clear about what kind of boyfriend/husband I wanted. (Wow! That seems very young to me now.) There were certain qualities he had to have. He had to be kind and gentle - those two were the most important. He had to love me dearly, and also think I was beautiful. Beyond that he could be whoever he was. I even wrote down these qualities and how old this man should be, our wedding date, and I stuck that paper in a drawer and forgot about it for years. I found it not too long ago, and astonishingly it had all happened as I had written it down, even to the date of the wedding. (well I had the year wrong)The Law of Attraction really works, quite amazingly. Something I need to always remember.


We met when I was 16 and Max was 18 at a festival in PA. He came up to the blanket I was sitting on and said, "Are you Denise?" I saw immediately in his eyes that I knew him from a different time. This young man was person I had been looking for. He didn't quite get it as quickly as I did but somewhere in him he must have felt it too because he held my hand that very same night on the walk back to the group campsite. It felt very right.


It took 4 years of growing and dating before we got married. That was a sweet time as well as a conflicting time too. There were many expectations of what we should and should not be doing. College was one of them, but that is another story.


Getting married and moving to New York City began the next crossroad. I would be lying if I said we never fought. There were terrible fights and patterns that we got into. Control issues, many mine. Luckily we waited to have a baby. We waited 5 years into the marriage. I wanted the baby. Max wasn't so sure about the whole idea. Let me tell you - you better have a lot of your shit together before having a baby because otherwise it really comes out under the stress. It's no longer him and me; it's three.


So our marriage continued, still having the same arguements and patterns, but less frequently with a baby keeping us busy. Basically we were happy, but there were those moments that didn't make sense until I started learning more about relationships. I was doing a lot of things wrong I learned. I did a women's weekend with Justin Sterling, of the Sterling Institute of Relationship, and worked with women to start healing and transforming my marriage relationship. I had women to go to now with my complaints  - not my husband. No one wants to hear nagging about things you don't like about them. This is where the acceptance part started coming in.Interestingly I began to understand that the relationship is an entity unto itself. It doesn't thrive unless it is taken care of. We all find it easy to care for the relationship in the beginning when it is new, but it withers and dies if not tended. Marriage consists of three parts - the husband, wife and the marriage itself.


I've been fine-tuning my relationship with Max ever since that women's weekend in 2000. Sometimes sticking my foot in my mouth and saying the absolute wrong things still, but I am getting better at nurturing my marriage and more and more say the right things or NOTHING AT ALL. It's not luck. It's not magic. It's like gardening and I'm tending to the marriage to best of my ablility in each moment.

---

I am the Luckiest...

Sorry, could not resist the counterpoint in the title... That Ben Folds song always makes me think of you, Denise.


What strikes me most about your post is how clearly it comes across that the success of our marriage is an excellent example of how the universe is meant to work for us. So, while we have been blessed in many ways throughout our relationship, we get credit for recognizing the blessings and taking action to follow the lead of those blessings.

Although, as you say, I was slower on the uptake in terms of knowing that we were destined for one another, we both remember the shared late night moment of absolute clarity when we knew that we were going to be together for the rest of our lives. There was so much certainty and simplicity in that realization. I always refer back to that moment as the perfect example of thought creating reality. It was simple, clear, absolute and filled with overwhelming joy. In short, it had all the most powerful elements of creative thought.

We say in the men's circle that absolute freedom is having no choice. Knowing that we had each found the one person that we were looking for as a lifetime partner so clearly so early on in our story gave us the freedom to pour ourselves without reservations into making our relationship flourish. This was the taking action part on following the blessing of that divine certainty. We received an inspiration, but we also did the hard work to make that inspiration and ongoing reality.

And, if I step back and look at our ongoing story, I can see the little signposts along the way to help us stay on track. The people we met that provided insights into our own ways of being, the experiences that these people led us both to, etc... The Sterling work was certainly a big one that has helped to put practical understanding and tools in our hands for shaping and nurturing our relationship.

I love the metaphor of tending a garden. While the process by which seeds become the fruits they were meant to be is full of all the mystery of the universe, it is the very simple, earthbound work of caring for the garden that provides a space for the plants to flourish.

And this carries through very well into how we have approached parenting - we provide the space and all the basic things that our children need to flourish into the beautiful creatures that they were each meant to be - but how exactly that happens and what they will become is a wonderful mystery.

Probably much more to be said on this topic, but I really wanted to bring out this one point. I hope we can both truly embrace how powerful the creative thought that began our journey together was and apply this lesson to continue to expand ourselves and our relationship into the beatiful, majestic and fruitful tree of life that it is and can be.