I want to share a little story with you, because like with many things talking about other people can help us deal with our own realities. It’s part of what makes dramas so appealing. When you see others confront and cope with problems, it can help you cope with your own. Sometimes, watching a tragedy can remind us of what we have now and why we should appreciate it more. So today, I want to tell you a story about John and Jane.
John and Jane met more than a dozen years ago. They were attracted to each other, but more than that – they were friends. They shared a number of common interests and they enjoyed sharing them together. Their relationship defined itself by a few typical moments and a few atypical ones. One of their favorite stories was John’s admission of love in the middle of an argument.
How cliché could they get?
Still, the cliché moments were only a part of their relationship and certainly not the ones that defined them. Jane and John were inseparable. They were best friends. They were lovers. They were constant companions. They reached out to talk to each other first every day and they were the last people they talked to at night before bed.
When John proposed to Jane, he knew that she was the woman he wanted to marry. He couldn’t put his finger on why exactly, just that he couldn’t imagine his life without her in it anymore. Jane surprised herself by wanting the marriage so much. She grew up with a mother who endured several broken relationships. Her parents consisted of a mother and a grandmother, not a mother and a father. Her definitions of marriage were often equated with foolishness and what she saw on television.
Still, she wanted to marry John. John wanted to marry her. It couldn’t get any better than that? There were a few problems in their plans and those problems left small flaws in the foundation of the marriage they were building. The first flaw was they never truly discussed their expectations. The second was they held with closed fist to their hearts, their own secret desires about the relationship. The third and nearly fatal flaw to their relationship was the fact that they both began to pretend to be something they weren’t.
So when John and Jane married – the couple they became after their wedding bore very little resemblance to the couple they were before their wedding. Ten years later, they were trying to figure out what went wrong and who was this person they were married to. It’s important to know one unshakable fact as we discuss John and Jane’s story — they loved each other. They loved the images and the real person beneath those images.
That love is what helped them deal with what came next.