Relationships can be one of the hardest things in life to maintain, and there are so many of them in your life at that. You connect to various people in your life through a familial relationship, friendship relationship, or maybe it’s just someone that you share your morning commute with but you always have a great chat every morning. Some relationships are just moments like the morning commute or they are long term like friendships and family.
Which is why I wonder if my relationship with my wife will stand the test of time. I’ve seen so many relationships break up that I think what will be the thing that does us in. Do we truly have the patience for one another?
Well I think I can finally answer that question now, I think sometimes in life you are given opportunities to test whether or not a relationship will stand the test of time particularly a marriage and I think recently we’ve had two such tests.\
The first test, we had two guinea pigs that both fell ill the same day (warning this gets tragic), one was put to sleep immediately (on my birthday no less), and the other still had a chance. We had to medicate him every two hours, and hand feed him every four hours. There was no rest for either of us as we did this for over twenty-four hours. You might be wondering why is this a test. This is a test, because if we had an infant, we just proved to each other that despite the lack of sleep we can work together, try to make informed decisions together about care, and that we were willing to take turns and allow the other to get some sleep while the other took care of our guinea pig in this case, but it could just as easily be a baby. Unfortunately it was all in vain as the second guinea pig died in our arms twenty minutes after we got him two new companions to encourage him to maybe want to start eating on his own.
The second test, and this was a true time test here, we recently spent two days driving from California to Canada. Road trips can be fun, but they can also be stressful, it can really cause a lot of fighting between couples. And time certainly seemed to drag on and on, but somehow we managed to communicate and enjoy the drive rather than fight the entire way. This was a mini test of time, as in the car there is really no getting away from one another, there is only room to entertain each other, talk to one another, so if you get into a fight. But somehow we managed to come through this unscathed.
So now I know better that we do have the patience to attempt to stand the test of time.
References:
Schneider, F.W., Gruman, J.A., & Coutts, L.A. (2012). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (2nd ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.