When you hear the word insanity, what comes to your mind? Maybe a character from a movie you saw sometime in the past or a decision you saw someone make and thought to yourself, “That is totally insane.”
A well-known description of the word insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result every time. Think about this scenario: I get ready to leave the house for work one day and discover when I try to start my car that the battery is dead. So I go back in the house and sit in my chair, and every thirty minutes I go back in the garage and try to start the car. I do that over and over all morning. That is insanity the same thing over and over expecting different results. For my car to start, I have to do something different. I need to call someone to come and charge the battery or replace it. My car will not start until one of those two actions is successfully carried out.
We all have our little insanities. Most of them are harmless and affect no one but ourselves. But what about the insanities we have in marriage? Are they harmless? Do they just affect us and no one else?
I grew up with great parents who had an incredible marriage, which served as the ideal model for me. So when Nancy and I got married, I tried to fit her into the same mold as my mother. My logical thinking went something like this: My mother was a great wife; Nancy wanted to be a great wife; so Nancy needed to be like my mom. Made perfect sense to me. That was my expectation. Now, there were two big things wrong with this expectation: (1) Nancy wasn’t my mom and did not want to be, and (2) I was not going to be able to “force” her into anything. My insanity was that I continued to hold Nancy to this unreasonable expectation over and over and over again in the first years of our marriage.
What about you? What expectations do you have in your marriage? Are they realistic? Have you shared them with your spouse? Honestly, my expectation of Nancy was unrealistic. There wasn’t anything wrong in wanting her to be a great wife (she wanted to be a great wife too), but the problem was that I wanted to define Nancy according to who my mom was and how my mom interacted with my dad as a wife. The really crazy part was that I never shared this expectation with Nancy, yet I became angry with her when she didn’t meet that unrealistic and unspoken expectation. Insanity? Oh, yeah! That was me.
Now would be a great time to take a deeper look at your marriage. What are your expectations? Are they realistic or not? Have you shared them? Have they turned into insanities? If you rated your marriage on a one-to-ten scale, where would you rate it? Where would you want it to be in five years? Ten years? What do you need to do today to have the marriage you want today and tomorrow?
The first step to change is always the hardest, but nothing will ever change until you take that first step. Don’t let something stand in the way of having the marriage God has for you. Stopping the insanity is your first secret.
