Marriage

I’ve often heard it said that “comparison is the thief of joy”. I can’t disagree. But when the saying arises, people are quick to bring up examples of “keeping up with the Joneses”, scrolling social media and seeing people whose perfectly clean homes, always smiling children, and endless vacations seem a cruel comparison to your hardest days. We think comparison is a phenomenon that only happens out there, us vs. others. We don’t realize that the comparison that may be stealing more joy than you realize is a little closer to home.

The scenario is familiar enough. Your spouse makes a potentially innocuous comment about your having left a cereal bowl on the table that should’ve made its way to the sink. In a perfect world you’d say, “Oh, thanks for the reminder, I know we both really want a clean house and we’re helping each other get there”. But this isn’t a perfect world. Instead, your already existing, underlying frustrations about your inability to create good tidying habits that stick collides with your self-consciousness at knowing that your spouse has very closely observed your years-long tendency to leave a little trail of messes demonstrating everywhere you’ve been in day; which then gets broadsided by the messes he leaves and the ways you have felt let down by his habits and suddenly, “Would you mind taking your cereal bowl to the sink?” has spun out and been ultimately answered with “Well, you’ve never cleaned a toilet bowl in our entire marriage!”

By being married, you have invited someone to know a little too much about you and with that comes the obvious vulnerability of another person being able to verbalize the things you hoped no one would ever know. The natural tendency is to immediately rush to your own defense (even when they didn’t mean their comment as an attack) and it’s just too easy to look down at what points you have on the table for the defense and find that your best one is the fact that you know too much about them too.

You noticed my weakness? Well guess what, I’ve seen yours too. Soon it becomes a competition of whose weaknesses are really the most detrimental to the overall goals you have together. It becomes a comparison to see who is really the one who should be taking blame. Ultimately though, you are defending the indefensible. No matter how good a case you make, you will always have weaknesses and no matter how much those weaknesses disappoint you, what they need is not a good defense, but a good Redeemer. And they’ve already got one.

But this example is really about petty things (we hope we all, at some point, advance beyond these kinds of conversations, but I assure you, I write this article in desperate need of my own advice, not because I have transcended the need for it). The kind of comparison that has been the real thief of my joy goes a little deeper.

My husband and I went into married life having quite open minds about who would do what. He grew up cooking and baking incessantly, I was never going to be the queen of our kitchen. Sometimes he has been the main breadwinner, sometimes I have. It has just depended on who was most gainfully employed between us, and with what. We were open and flexible in our thinking about our roles and it served us fairly well. That is, until we had our first baby.

Turns out, no matter how ready and willing you are to divide the task of raising a child equally, there some pretty huge things that fall squarely on a woman’s shoulders that a man just can’t really help with. My pregnancy was fairly easy on me, it actually felt kind of magical that this was something only I could give. When we went to the anatomy ultrasound and saw the baby’s lungs and heart and ribs and legs for the first time, I was in absolute awe that my body just knew how to do all that.

Then, he was born. And I was absolutely overwhelmed with my love for him.

But then I was almost immediately overwhelmed with what he demanded of me. And again, there were ways that my husband couldn’t share the load.

It wasn’t for lack of willingness. We gave our baby one bottle a night so that Bryan could take a night shift and I could get a good block of uninterrupted rest. But every other feeding, every few hours, day and night, was from me. It felt like I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything because I was always needed and I didn’t know how to nurse privately enough to be in a public place. I was drained, I was still healing from the birth, I was tired, and I felt like a milk cow.

The very day of my six-week postpartum check-up, we flew to Alaska for the summer so Bryan could take a dream job leading ATV tours. We had bought an RV to live in, on his parents’ property up there, and each day, he would ride 50 miles through Alaska backcountry, seeing the most beautiful sights and breathing in the freedom of the wide open and wild places; while I sat around in our little house on wheels. I had a beautiful sight too. My love for this little baby was overwhelming. When he went to sleep at night, I’d stay up in the dark, looking at pictures of him. But it was also a beautiful sight that was constantly with me. I didn’t go anywhere without him. Even when I showered, I could pull back the curtain and he was just sitting there in a bouncer watching for me. In my life of independent eccentricity to that point, it was a tether I’d never had.

Other members of my husband’s family offered to help and watch him so I could do things or take him so we could go on a date. But the hormonal flood of euphoric attachment to him, and ever-present anxiety for his safety made it hard to step away, even though I badly needed to. Never has something you loved so dearly also seemed so fragile.

Partway through the summer, Bryan came home and mentioned casually that he’d been invited on a weekend fishing trip and said that he would go. And until that moment, I hadn’t realized just how differently our experiences with new parenthood were going. He didn’t feel like a milk cow. His body hadn’t changed so much that he didn’t really recognize himself anymore. He wasn’t having weird postpartum health problems. And though he truly jumped in to help at every chance when he was around, he could also leave for hours and hours of work and even say yes to a fishing trip away and not consider how the baby would eat without him there.

I couldn’t help but compare.

I know many of you will be quick to jump in and say I was creating a bond with my child that will always be different than my husband’s. That he will never get to feel the awe and joy of those first little fluttering kicks when the baby was still inside. That I was getting treasured, precious time with our infant son that he wasn’t getting. And that’s all true. And now that I know how short that stage was, it’s easier to take that perspective, but at that time—when it felt like this was my new forever—it was a blow to hear that he was still living a life where he could say yes to a night away, just for fun.

He didn’t end up going on that fishing trip. But I’ve never forgotten that moment of his telling me about the invitation and feeling like we were living on two different planets in what new parenthood looked like for us.

But sitting and comparing and tallying who was getting the better deal, robbed me of joy then and it still robs me of joy when I slip into that trap now.

We are told not to compare with our neighbors or with the people we see online because it’s too easy to compare our weaknesses with their strengths or our hardest days with their Pinterest worthy ones. Without really knowing it, that’s exactly what I was doing with my husband. It was incidental that he happened to be offered a dream opportunity the same time that we were expecting a baby and I had no idea what I was in for with the postpartum experience. I thought we were in the same stage, but we weren’t. Those were my hardest days. They were some of his loveliest ones. It wasn’t a fair comparison.

But the consequence of comparing yourself with some influencer you don’t know, and feeling resentful as a result is that the person you don’t even know still has the same relationship with you…as someone you don’t know. The soil you had with that person wasn’t exactly fertile for deep lifelong joys anyway. But cultivating a grim little garden of resentments towards your spouse because of unfair comparisons salts some the most fertile soil you had for life’s greatest joys. The security and companionship and connection and love that could’ve grown there is one of the things most worth having in all of life. And comparison truly robs it of joy.

Even now, when I am at home with my four-year-old and two-year-old, and I struggle so hard to maintain momentum on a task or finish a thought as interruptions and new messes and sticky hands and loose puppies keep me from ever feeling like I accomplish anything–I look longingly at my husband’s work days where he gets into a flow and sees a task all the way through to its finish and can’t help but compare. But if I’m going to compare a day like that, I also have to compare the days when I get to go to the aquarium in the middle of a Tuesday and eat ice cream with the two cutest boys in the world and then snuggle three wide in a king size bed and snooze the afternoon away while my husband is struggling with trucks that break down, tree removals that turn into way bigger jobs than he bargained for, bureaucratic red tape he didn’t see coming, and payroll that’s due when the clients haven’t paid.

We both have rough days and we both have glowing ones. And the thing about marrying someone that isn’t you, is that your days don’t just perfectly line up in lock-step. Sometimes you even spend the day together and do the very same things and one of you comes away feeling optimistic and excited and the other comes away disconnected and blue. You are not the same person. That is the struggle and the joy. There’s not something wrong with them if they don’t feel exactly how you do. Their differences are an invitation for you to grow in understanding and empathy.

We are human. Sometimes we can’t help but compare in our heads. But next time you do, I encourage you to stop for second and ask yourself some questions before anything is allowed to come out of your mouth. Say your spouse asks if you can keep the kiddos occupied so he can take a Sunday nap; before you say, “When’s the last time I got to have a Sunday nap?”, stop and ask yourself, “Do I ever even ask for that? If I did, would he help me to have it?” Sometimes the perceived inequalities between your experience and your spouse’s come down to what they have requested and what you have not. I find sometimes that I don’t always think it’s ok to want certain things even when my husband actively encourages me to pursue them if they’re important to me.

So, as you begin the journey of training your brain to stop dwelling in comparison with your spouse, let the comparisons that are left invite you to introspection about the needs you have that you could be more proactive in having met. And as for those little, cereal bowl things, rather than spend your energy pointing out the ways they aren’t holding up their end, take a moment to remember that marriage is rarely 50/50—sometimes you’ve only got 20 to give and you need a little help with the rest and sometimes your spouse is the one that needs your care and patience. Don’t constantly take temperatures or measurements of who is doing more. Be the safe place for your spouse that you would hope to have.

If comparison is stealing your joy, let compassion bring it back.