love is an open door (only one though)

It started with a brutal insult from me to Jesse. 

We were in the car and I was singing screeching out my favorite of the Frozen soundtrack songs, "Love is an Open Door," the duet between Anna and Prince Hans (doy). 

 

Jinx. Jinx again!

Jesse, rather understandably (to a rational person, at least) jumped in on the boy part. I immediately and violently shushed him and barked, "No, stop! I want to sing it with him. I like his voice better."

And almost immediately after it was out of my mouth, I was like

 

OHHHHHHHHHHHHH FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDGE

See, I wanted to live out a little 2-minute fantasy wherein I play an ignored, shut-in, Nordic princess falling in love with a cartoon ginger prince (who, if you've seen the film....you know...) at my first ever ball. And in pursuing this little mental escape, I had just majorly taken a chunk out of the heart of my real life, forever husband AND managed to insult his singing voice in the process (he is a professional worship leader, soooo...extra wounding points landed there). 

It got me thinking about how often I do this. How often I innocently--for just a moment--wish my love story was something different, or had something more than what it actually does. It could be anything from "I wish I had met my husband in a really crazy, serendipitous way like Anna and Hans," to "my life would be so much more exciting if I was just Khaleesi Drogo."

 

Duh

Of course, we do this all the time. A huge part of the fun of books and TV and movies and putting yourself in the characters' place and imagining how you would walk through their story. There’s probably nothing wrong with that.

But I noticed in that one moment when I snapped at Jesse to butt out and leave me and Hans to our little interlude, in chasing that little escape, it had become wrong. I was actually resenting Jesse a little bit for being not that. "You aren't able to fulfill this little side-dream of mine, so just please shut up and let me pursue it elsewhere for a second, thank you."

I thought, "Isn't that just like a stereotypical American living in 2014?" (Maybe that's an unfair generalization, and I should just say, "isn't that just like me?"). In my actual everyday reality I have a husband who is faithful, attentive, hilarious, kind, hardworking (at home maybe even more than at work!), utterly committed to me, and also damn freakin' hot. I feel like 99.9% of women everywhere who have ever wanted a husband would be pretty happy to end up with a guy they could describe that way. And yet here I am trying to mentally cherry-pick for some fictional more, and being pretty lazily ungrateful for my real man in the process.

It made me see how dangerous it can be to look outside of your own love story for something that might be missing, for something more. 

Okay, sure, if it's 3 dragon eggs you're looking for, you're probably going to be alright. But what if what you're looking for is attentiveness because your husband never seems to have much time anymore for just pouring into you, but your neighbor or some guy at work hangs on your every word?

I think if that was me, I would be tempted to start to somehow convince myself that I could have both. My husband.....aaaaand maybe just the good feelings the attention from the other guy brought me too. And that just gets into a bucket full of yikes.

So after my horrible moment of insulting Jesse I decided to make a commitment to our love story. To stop daydreaming on "what it would be like if..." and spend time in and on our story. Our. One. Story. 

It might not be worth selling the movie rights, it might not have a single talking snowman or Targaryen in sight, and it--gasp--probably won't even make me "feel happy" a lot of the time, but it's the one that is real and it's the only one whose lead male character has actually vowed to give a crap about how that story turns out.

Maybe your prince or your love story isn't how you would have described him/it when you wrote the dream script of your life. Maybe you say, "yeah, easy for you to say, keight, since you have the guy of your dreams already. But what if I’m stuck in my story with someone i don’t even like anymore?" first of all, that has been me...LOTS of times. second of all, unless we are talking abuse or infidelity (and sometimes even then...y'all know I believe the restoring power of Jesus is seriously bananas and can do anything), I just don't see where it's ever going to be more profitable to pour yourself--your effort, attention, grace, everything--anywhere but back into your current marriage.

I know that this is a really simplistic view, and that it's far uglier, far more complex, and can feel far more hopeless than I’ve described. I just felt like, for a second, I got a really good glimpse of one of the ways satan can start to tempt my mind away from my own magical (that's not mushy baloney! 2 trying to become 1 is magic...straight up, playa) love story, and it was such a powerful moment of exposure to me, and so convicted me that I felt compelled to share.

It's hard. But I think it's always worth it. And that, my friends, is what she said.

We reclaimed that song, by the way. FOR US. It's officially a Keight & Jesse love song. So as you might expect, that track now plays a lot more like this in our car (except we don't call ourselves good-looking on YouTube).