Before You Get Married, You Should Know This

Mr Holdsworth on relationships. This young man is wise beyond his years! I wish I'd had his wisdom 36 years ago yesterday when I said 'I do' with my Cuter and Shorter Half!

His introduction:

Imagine if, for some reason, it was suddenly possible to know everything about anyone.We’re talking about all the most embarrassing things you’d rather keep hidden. In considering this, the first thing that stood out to me is that if this happened, it would be virtually impossible for any of us to get a first date. Which is interesting, because whenever we’re constructing a profile for something like a dating website, we’re doing our best to portray ourselves in as positive a depiction as possible. We neglect all of our shortcomings, if we’re even aware of them at all, and amplify all of our best traits. But in my imaginary world, your profile would be filled with pictures of you first thing in the morning and descriptions of you on your worst days. There are a lot of takeaways from this imagined scenario that I could spend time on but I want to use it to focus in on just one which is that it reveals how deliberate we are in casting ourselves in the best possible light and how seemingly necessary this is for us to initiate new relationships. It underscores, that in the real world, where we can keep that stuff hidden to a point, we will eventually, disappoint each other. Almost every relationship starts off based on the perception and acceptance of these incomplete versions of ourselves. We kindle our relationships, in a way, based on a lie and it’s only later that we start to let down our guard and let slip the other side of who we are – often because it’s just too exhausting to keep the act up. When we go on first dates, we’re on our absolute best behaviour. We’re trying to convince the other person that we really are as great as our profile suggests. But the longer a person is exposed to you or I, the more the façade starts to crumble and the real you starts to pronounce itself. And this process, will inevitably be a disappointment to your significant other because that’s not what they signed up for. When they agreed to go on a second and third date, they thought it was going to be with the person they went on a first date with. But after spending enough time with you, they will eventually catch you… being yourself. They’ll discover your flaws. And this process can be really heart breaking for some people. What happened to the person I had so much fun with in the beginning? You might ask yourself questions like, “What happened to the person that made my pulse race when I got a text from them? If they don’t make me feel that way anymore, does that mean that I don’t love them anymore? The reason they don’t excite you the way they used to is because that person, the one that made your pulse race, didn’t exist. You were falling for just one side, the best side, of that person and the longer you’ve spent with them, the more they’ve taken on a dimension that is less flattering and more real. So the thing that we all have to learn, and it’s best if we can get a grip on this principle before it before it’s confronting us in an actual relationship, is that your experience of growing in a long term, committed relationship with someone will be one in which experiences of disappointment, and occasions that call for forgiveness will increase as time goes on. At first, you’ll become infatuated with a person that only shows you their best side. But eventually, it will become impossible for them to keep up that act. The closer you get, the more their faults will be revealed and the more you’ll have to forgive. So, in light of that we will always come to a crossroads, in every relationship. Are we going to learn to forgive and love someone no matter what, or are we going to let that experience of disappointment define our ability to get close to someone? And that experience of learning to forgive that person, obviously, is not easy but it’s the test of true love. It’s a challenge to you to become more loving yourself. Real love should cost you something and what I’m trying to do in this video is prepare you for that cost. If love really deserves the high and noble pedestal that we place it on, then it shouldn’t be easy. Why would we admire someone who only loves others that compulsively makes them feel good? That’s why we insist on that famous line in our marriage vows, “for better or worse.” In our brave age of no fault divorce, we don’t really respect those vows any more, but this is what truly loving someone challenges us with. We can either learn to forgive and love someone no matter what, at ever step, or we can keep chasing that illusive relationship with a fictitious person that will never require us to forgive them of their brokenness.