Celebrating A 15-Year Relationship With Lessons Learned On Love & Commitment
My wife and I just celebrated our 15th anniversary. That’s eight years married, fifteen together. We met in 2009 while we were both studying abroad in France. I’m from Canada. She’s from South Korea. So from the start the odds were stacked against us. We were basically kids falling in love. We had (and continue to have) cultural differences. We only had about five months together before she finished her studies in France and returned to Korea. That kicked off a couple of years of long-distance relationship. What are the odds that we’re still together to this day? How is it that we’ve made it this far, nonstop, and have had the strength to embark two years ago on our most joyous challenge: raising our son in Europe, far from family support.
The answer is that we’ve done things right. We’ve both worked hard to make it work. We’ve made sacrifices. To celebrate our 15-year milestone, I wanted to reflect on those things done well.
Right Speech
Right Speech is a fold of The Eightfold Path from Buddhist traditions. It teaches us to use speech that promotes peace and reconciliation. It talks about timeliness of speech, knowing when and when not to speak. I’ve chosen to lead with this because, although I am far from a master, at least attempting to practice Right Speech has helped our relationship immensely.
For me, it’s often knowing when to keep my mouth shut. More specifically, it’s about knowing the right and wrong times to bring something up. It’s also about listening. When she’s telling me about something stressful that’s happened on her side of the family, I don’t need to say much. She’s not looking for suggestions on how to make it better. She doesn’t need my two cents. She needs me to look her in the eyes and listen, maybe asking a sincere question or two.
Right Speech is about refraining from blame. It’s about filling what I call ‘neutral time’, which is simply those mundane moments at home where nothing much is going on, with a kind word, a compliment, or by simply asking, ‘Did I say I love you today?’
Another rule I follow is to never talk about regrets. We should have done this. I wish you had done that. Unless it is somehow constructive, we should never utter words of regret. What’s done is done.
Commitment
Marriage or long-term partnerships of any kind are hard. It’s a marathon. I come from a divorced family. I didn’t grow up with religion. But somehow, some way, when I decided to get married, I viewed it as a sacred oath. I’m here until the end, no matter what. I think this is important to mention because it seems, based on what I see in our culture, that people are way too quick to look for the door. You’re not happy? Well, if you’re looking to your relationship for happiness, then you’re looking in the wrong place. If I look at the net sum of our relationship, it does bring me happiness, especially now that it’s linked inextricably to my beautiful son who brings me immense joy. But there are a lot of times that the relationship makes me very unhappy. Boo hoo. I made a commitment. If times are tough it means you need to work harder on yourself and your relationship. You need patience. You need to be able to ride things out, weather storms, and keep on going. It’s a commitment.
Be Their Biggest Fan
In the aforementioned tough times, it’s so easy to begin to see the other person as the enemy. She’s doing this to me. He’s making me feel this way. It’s their fault. We need to counter those thoughts by reminding ourselves that we love this person. We should want them to do well. We want them to feel good. We want to see them at their best. So be their biggest supporter. If the neighbor is making noise and your partner asks you to tell them to keep it down, even though you think the neighbor has every right to play their music at 8PM, you don’t argue with your partner. You go talk to the neighbor, even if it makes you feel really uncomfortable (as it did in my case). It’s an easy win, but it’s no small thing. You need to take their side. You need to be by their side. Fight for them. Cheer them on.
Pretend You Don’t Know Them
I came across this bit of advice in one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books. If you’ve read my posts before, you probably know that Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk, has become my go-to teacher for all things mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhism. It was probably in his book How To Fight, which is about dealing with conflict and troubles in relationships, where I discovered this concept. He wrote about pretending to meet your significant other for the first time.
Over the years, we’ve developed all kinds of notions and concepts about our partners. But the thing about the brain’s tendency to build concepts and use language to categorize and label things is that it’s not always helpful and it’s often inaccurate. So pretending to meet them again for the first time not only allows us to revisit those ‘love at first sight’ feelings, to see them again in that fresh light, but it also strips away all the bullshit stories we’ve been telling ourselves about them. They’re so controlling. They love to blame. I wish they were better at managing stress. These are all just stories we’re telling ourselves about them. But when you first met them, there were no stories. There was a person. That person is still there, we just need to open our eyes to see and stop listening to the fabricated stories we tell ourselves about them.
Crank Up The Love
When times are tough, the urge is to run away or fight. These are usually the wrong responses. Although it can feel incredibly hard, when times are tough it’s precisely when you need to crank up the love. You may feel like you need to talk things through, or have it out in an argument, but you don’t. You need to speak with love and understanding. You need to give them a massage. You need to take the dishes tonight so that they can rest. Fight fire with love.
Final thoughts
This has been easy to write. It was one of those stream-of-consciously pieces where the words just fell out of me. I guess that’s because I think about this stuff often. And maybe that’s the final tip that underpins them all: you need to take your intimate relationship seriously. It's not unlike a career. It requires forethought, planning, revision, strategy, and good communication. If you just show up to work every day and do the bare minimum or worse, you’re not going very far in your career. A relationship is a bit like that. You need to be constantly thinking about how you can make it better and you need the courage and wisdom to show up every day to do your best.