My Dear Kat,
One of the main reasons for our lack of conflict is that we agree on the ground rules. The funny thing is that originally we were never explicit about them, with maybe the exception of sexual monogamy, and it wasn’t until we came to write our wedding vows that we put our common understandings into words.
I love the way we did it. We sat side by side on the bed, and each wrote down what was important for us. Then we exchanged lists and talked about our responses to each item. Often, we had said the same thing in different ways.
We came back to this a number of times over several days, talking about everything until we had identified and clarified the essence of what we were saying, and out of this, we crafted our vows.
- I promise to be your partner and lover through life.
- I promise to dwell in love, to act from love, to hear with love, to speak from love.
- I promise to always be truthful and to share what I feel.
- I promise to recognize and honor who you are and to always remember that “you are you and I am me”.
- I promise to choose the positive and strive toward the good and act in support of you always all ways.
- With these promises I celebrate our union and rejoice in the Grace that brought us together.
It was, as is always the case with you, a delightful organic process. There were no points of significant disagreement; maybe some of emphasis, at most.
I was about to say that because we have this shared agreement on how we live life together, there is no need for conflict, but that doesn’t follow: we could still argue over which movie to see. That doesn’t happen, because the choice of movie is just not that important. The sense of peace that comes from our joint understanding of how we live our lives together far outweighs my desire to see a particular movie!
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