Confabulation

It was requested that I work the word "confabulatory" into my next blog post, so here I am. One definition of the word is "to talk casually; chat." And that's what I'm going to do today. Here are some things that keep running around in my head day after day....

Yesterday, I went to the bookstore during my lunch break. There was a little boy walking out the door with his dad just in front of me, and the boy was asking his dad if both doors worked. His dad said yes of course they both work, but you only need to use one. So I used the other one and said, see, this one does work!

And I found myself again wishing deeply that I were in a bookstore with my own three year old, rather than escaping my desk for an hour between business, alone. Lately, there's been a trend among my friends that ex-boyfriends are getting engaged and married, and while we, the exes, are sure that these men are not good for us, it's often difficult to navigate the waves of jealousy towards these men that wash quickly over us, the single girls. Not because we want those men in particular, but because, what's wrong with us?

One friend articulated the frustrated questions clearly: "I just wonder sometimes. I feel like I am finally trying to gear my life toward God and get my shit together. I'm struggling and working hard to correct myself. Did he correct himself? Is it possible that he found love in the last 2 years, real love and I can't get a date!! What is that about??" (See, other people say "God" reverently and cuss in the same sentence!)

Last weekend, one of my roommates and I were watching The Notebook because we like to torture ourselves. (Sidenote: do you ever wonder how Nicholas Sparks' wife feels about all this love story writing? Does he romance her as much as his characters do? I should hope so.) When the movie was over, she asked me: "Do you think it's possible for two people to really have love like that?"

I have moments where I am so desperate for my happily ever after and other moments where I feel totally unprepared to know how to love a man. Those moments tell me I'm not ready yet, that there's more for me to learn to be capable of being fully myself and also capable of letting go of control, in the knowledge that I'll never be able to love someone in a way that will complete him. He has to find his completion in Christ, just like I do. But that also means I have to know that I will never be anyone's end-all be-all. And if I am, I will fail him, time and again.

This terrifies me. Because as cliche as that movie is, I have loved like that and I have lost it because I did not understand that I was completely selfish. I did not understand that a man will never complete me. I loved like that, not only for the sake of loving another, but because I wanted to be loved that way. I played games and I demanded and I held expectations from books and movies and unrealities.

It's disappointing really, to see what I once held and to understand how I so handily misused him. But, that understanding makes my heart change. It makes me see that loving a person is just that-- it is choosing another's happiness over your own. It is submission. It is support. It is encouragement. It is shutting the hell up sometimes. It is saying things outloud instead of holding them inside to fester. It's accepting your own humanity. It is being wrong and saying so. It is forgiveness.

My favorite depiction of marriage is a walk. Marriage is choosing to walk with one person forever, to walk life, with vallies and mountains and joys and sorrows, with the realization that the other person is only a person. I will marry a man and he will still just be a man. He will not have any hope of saving me or I of saving him. But we'll be walking together, and I suppose that having that person to be my person, my hand to hold is the point.

I imagine that walking with another human being will make my brokenness ever more obvious with each passing day. I've heard it said that marriage isn't meant to make us happier, it's meant to make us holier. Maybe that's what is so hard-- the fact that our beliefs about marriage and partnership in life are not defined the way the culture swirling around us would define them. We swim in an ocean of "if it feels good, do it" and don't stop to consider that actual heart change rarely feels good.

When I say that I like change, I don't mean it externally, and I don't think I mean the process. This is painful, this part right here. It's the result that I like. I've spent so much of my life making choices that are difficult because I believe them to be right. I'm sure I will continue to do this, but damn it. Why do I so want an immediate payoff and why isn't there one?

Another definition for confabulation is "the replacement of a gap in a person's memory by a falsification that he or she believes to be true." Isn't it interesting that we believe "happily ever after" to be true when that's not really how it works at all?

I feel like I just mentally threw up onto this page.

*With thanks to S & T for quotes & opinions.