"about me"

Wife.

Christian.

Framer.

Nanny.

Goldfish owner.

Crafter.

Singer.

Fashion lover.

I recently ran into some stereotype-driven conflict on a blogger's page. After urging others who commented on her post about divorce to realize that marriage is not passive and that you can't gauge your commitment solely on feeling butterflies, someone responded rather bizarrely:

"Leah, it's obvious you have a religious axe to grind, but this is not the place for it..." 

To further clarify, this is what I posted:

"the farse here is feeling that there should always be butterflies. no wonder so many people get divorced. those butterflies are dopamine, which hype you up and stay in your body for about 18 months after you fall in love. they leave after that and you're still left with a relationship to work on. nobody would still be married if they expected prolonged butterflies. plus, that would be very uncomfortable. 

i'm not saying this to outright disapprove of your decision, - . I just felt a need to clear this up. Marriage is hard work. It's not something that happens to you; you actively pursue it or you don't." 

I can only conclude that the respondent either thinks anyone who is pro-marriage is also a fundamentalist Christian or - and this is more likely - she read my little bio on my profile and mentally linked my criticism to it. I can imagine her saying to herself: "oh, isn't that just like an ignorant American Christian to say something anti-divorce on this blog where we're all supposed to be nice and supportive." 

I will concede that my Christian upbringing likely has something to do with my commitment to marriage. But I think it makes just as much sense to say I have been too heavily influenced by those old married couples who think marriage is a life long commitment. Or human society who prizes relational commitment. Or love itself, which demands I give up a little of my own comfort for the comfort of my friends and family. Or maturity, which tells me that life is, in fact, not about me at all, that life is much more worth living when I live in relationship and take responsibility for my behavior.

In conclusion, my "axe to grind" is really just an attempt at waking up my self-obsessed generation to the destructive nature of too much self love. I've heard it said that you have to love yourself before you can love others fully, and maybe that's true. But if you love yourself too much, it's impossible to love anyone else fully. It's impossible to really commit to anything or anyone. When the end goal is to make yourself happy, you will search your whole life and never find it. When the end goal is contentment in a responsible community of people who have striven and nagged and hurt and let go of themselves for your benefit, alongside you, you will probably be surprised one day, waking up to light and birdsong, at how happy you are.

To round out the whole discussion, think about this: next time you read someone's fragmented online bio, try not to see them as a list, but as a nuanced individual. I am not a naive, fundamentalist, Republican housewife (which one may assume from the word, "Christian"). Even if I were, I would be much much more than that. Judge me on my words, not on my particular life situation. Judge me on my heart, my intentions, my sometimes over-the-top passion, not on a single word placed out of context.