eMatrimony.org

Supporting, Encouraging, and Challenging the WWME Community

  Family - Weekend Effect

Love Is A Daily Decision

Ed & Janet Wojnaroski

(Excerpted from Fall 1993 Matrimony magazine)

Tears dropped from my face and splotched the letter I was writing to my wife about my reasons to go on living. I had rediscovered that she was my central reason to live and I wept for the past five years of wasted time. Around me, twenty other men, scattered around a hotel meeting room wrote similar letters to their wives and I could hear many of them weeping, too. Our wives had gone to our rooms to write the letters, their love letters, about why they wanted to live.

We were nearing the end of an exhausting Marriage Encounter weekend. It had drained us physically and emotionally, yet nothing Janet and I had tried over the past five years had brought us so close together or made us as intimate as we felt on that Sunday, almost four years ago. Like flowers, long deprived of light, we basked in the noon sun.

When I pledged to stay with Janet until death, I meant it. But much had happened to dim the memory of our wedding day and the open love we once felt so deeply and reached so easily. We had buried it under a mountain of demands that grew out of careers, a child, and the beginnings of parental care. I had built a wall around me of unmet expectations based not on the demands themselves, but on how I thought Janet should meet them, how I wanted to meet them, and how she would not. Janet retreated from my wall into her career and outside activities. She would often be gone in the evening desperately seeking solace in activity while I stayed home, resenting her absence and climbing ever more deeply into myself and the TV.

We barely talked about it. Even when we went to marriage counseling, we barely talked about it. Janet wanted to return to our glory days but I would not go on her terms. She would not go on mine. Impasse.

A friend of Janet's suggested Marriage Encounter, not, he said because we "needed it" but because we "deserved it". We decided to go when our tenth anniversary came and went without renewing our vows as we had long planned to do.

No one told us what might happen. I went prepared to leave. But instead of lectures on ''good'' marriages, we found people who filled the room with love. We found people who shared their intimate lives with us and who made themselves vulnerable so that we might see a way to make our marriage our top priority. There were no cold analyses, no intellectual traps, no useless and foolish advice. Here were people who willingly gave themselves to us and when I recall their gift, tears still come.

I heard them. I opened myself to their message. As I listened to them tell me of their own lives, of their own struggles to be whole, to be in love, my walls melted. Janet heard. too. The distance between us collapsed. Bright, clean, in open love again, Janet and I stood on a mountaintop gazing into each other's eyes.

The three days of Marriage Encounter were like a cocoon. It protected us from the outside world and let us concentrate on each other without interruptions No phone. No jobs. No housework. The experience refreshed our love, reminded us of our love, uncovered our love. But we didn't go in as caterpillars to emerge as butterflies.

As we danced and flew and floated up the interstate on our way home after a final Mass on Sunday, we realized that the weekend hadn't erased any demand that had flawed our 10th anniversary or the years leading up to it. Mixed with our joy, those demands felt like a heavy, grey cloud and promised to shroud our new love unless we fought to keep Marriage Encounter's message alive in our daily lives.

We joined a "share group". Having a group of encountered couples to meet with once a month would keep us pointed in the right direction. Often, over the last four years, whenever hope to keep the message alive was no more than a bubble on the wind, we'd go to the share group and find strength to try again, to protect that lone bubble from sharp pins, to blow more bubbles.

And over and over again we heard what was for us the central message - that love is a decision; that I can decide to love Janet with my heart even when my head tells me that she is unlovable; that she can decide not to retreat from me when I withdraw. No outside pressures can force us to react unloving. No demands can short circuit our love if we refuse to let it happen.

Take dish washing. I hate it. In my hate I expect to die unrepentant so Janet does them. But some nights she can't right after dinner because of an evening activity. The second she walks out the door I start talking to myself about those awful dishes. I know that if I don't do them she will when she returns home, usually tired and ready for bed. I know the smile she'll give me if she walks in and sees them clean. I know how good she'll feel because she's told me loudly and often. Washing the dishes is a real decision to love.

But, it's easier said than done. I cannot tell you why such a splendid yet simple concept should prove so hard, but it is. Some nights I'll do the dishes and some nights I won't. We often revert to our old, unloving behaviors. It can happen in a heartbeat. It seems we ride a perpetual roller-coaster full of unexpected ups and downs and curves that throw us off track. We forget to make love-centered decisions. Sometimes we refuse to. The struggle to make decisions to love never ends for us because Marriage Encounter has no magic elixir that brings everlasting joy. But it did offer us a key to unlock the power of our love and that, said Robert Frost, “has made all the difference"

Click here for a printable version (PDF, 11KB)