Marriage is a Contract

Rob is a WAY better person than I am.  We'll just start there.  :)  Today it was brought up by a friend that my love for Rob seems conditional.  And she's not the first person to call me on that.  I've told Rob that I would leave him if his weight was out of control, for instance.  But the way I see it, that doesn't make my love conditional.  ...  This got me thinking about an e-mail I wrote months ago to a different friend about the same subject seen in a slightly different light.  I thought I'd post it here.

It revolves around the idea that to me marriage is a contract.  ...  (And to my friend who brought this up, I love that you challenge me!  Honestly.  It's always thought-provoking and makes me think about who I am and what I'm all about.  We just never have quite enough time to talk all about it - I'd love to go through things and through things and through things with you.  It makes me a better person.  Plus, we rarely agree, and I LOVE that!)

I've been giving some thought to what we talked about, in terms of whether or not my love for Rob is unconditional.  Trying to figure out what it means to me, and then how to adequately explain it.

Do I love Rob unconditionally?  Yes.  But I'm not married to him unconditionally.

Marriage is a contract.  I don't mean like a paper contract.  It's an emotional contract, an unwritten contract.  The paper doesn't matter, it's just a formality.

The contract means lots of important things, but mostly, to me, the important ones are these two:  

1 - I believe that Rob and I are best served (or at least well enough served) by being married to each other.  

2 - I will do everything that I can to stay in love with the man I married.

The second part is the unconditional part.  I look past his faults, or better put, I try to figure out how to work with his faults.  I'm forgiving and loving.  I realize that he'll never be perfect, and I won't either.  I try to figure out how to work with my OWN faults in a way that keeps us together instead of driving us apart.  I wake up and CHOOSE to be married to him every single day.  This part also obligates me to say when I'm unhappy.  To tell him when I feel like things aren't going smoothly.  This allows us to work on it, and makes it easier for me to love him tomorrow.  It's easier to work on small problems instead of big ones.

The first part is the conditional agreement.  I agreed to marry Rob, I wrote that contract, because I thought we would make each other happy.  We would be good to each other.  But that could someday, any day, not be true.  It would be a breach of contract if he were to physically abuse me, for instance.  Or in any OTHER way abuse me.  But abuse isn't the only time when the contract could be breached.  If he were causing me daily pain on a long-term basis, or if I was doing the same to him, then neither of us would be obligated to stay.  If I were able to look at my relationship with Rob and clearly see that we would be happier and better off apart, then I would leave him.  

There could be mitigating factors.  How long has it been going on?  What was the attitude at the time - one of nonchalance?  (Ooh!  I just remembered something relevant about a recurring nightmare that I have.  Will share in a minute.)  And is it likely to resolve itself?  Is it something that I personally can overcome within myself?  

What about some other things:  If Rob neglected me and/or the children.  If he was a lousy, rotten father.  If I honestly felt that my children would be better off without him.  It's interesting to throw kids into it, because kids are a different sort of contract.  I agreed to love them NO MATTER WHAT.  There's no conditional aspect of parenthood.  I agreed to protect them, take care of them.  If they were best served by leaving their father, then I would not hesitate to do so, even if I still loved Rob.

And the contract that I made with Rob now includes our children.  We agreed to love, protect, and take care of them together.  I would hope that if I was a lousy mother, he would take the kids and leave me, even if he loved me.  ...  The time when I felt like he was going to make a decision that would potentially endanger our children, I was VERY upset by it.  After it was all over, I told him that if he hadn't backed down, then I would have left him, at least temporarily.  Not as a power play, mind you.  But because that part of the marriage contract had been breached.

Rob, I am POSITIVE, does not think that the conditional part of the marriage contract exists.  But he is aware that it exists for me.  And I wonder if it's not partly a male-female difference.  I have always been afraid of abuse.  And I need a way to protect myself from it.  Feeling that I can't leave a marriage because I love Rob unconditionally, well, that's not a good thing if he's abusing me.  And it forced me, as a thoughtful woman, to come up with my Marriage Contract.  When am I obligated to stay and work it out?  When am I not?  

In the temple we learn that the contract that Eve made with Adam was conditional.  She agrees to listen to what Adam says SO FAR AS Adam listens to the Lord.  So what if Adam stops listening?  Then she doesn't have to listen, that's what (Tamra's interpretation).  The rules change when one side isn't keeping his or her end of the bargain.

...  So, the recurring nightmare that I have.  It's relevant because it spotlights how I feel about marriage, and what I can and can't work with.  I've always wondered why this particular dream has always frightened me, made me so angry, and now I think I understand.  Okay, so the dream, in its many variations involves Rob doing something really, really stupid.  He's slept with another woman.  He has a kid he never told me about.  He makes some other BIG mistake.  And in the dream I usually start with, "Okay, I can work with this.  I can try to see if we can work this out."  And then the part that kills it is when Rob says, "I don't see what the big deal is."  

That nonchalance is a deal breaker.  It means he broke our marriage contract, and he doesn't care.  What Rob and I went through years back*, it was only recoverable, to me, because he cared.  He wanted to change and make things better.  What if he'd said, "Tamra, you should get over it.  It wasn't a big deal."  Well, I would have thought really hard about buying 4 plane tickets to my parents' house, with no return date.  The contract we've made, it's a BIG DEAL.  If he doesn't feel that way, too, then I wouldn't stick around.  

Alright.  Hopefully that made sense and wasn't one jumbly mess.  And even if you don't agree with it (I wasn't trying to convince you that I'm right or anything), then at least hopefully you'll see where I'm coming from.  I absolutely love Rob unconditionally.  But thankfully the Lord made marriage a conditional situation because he loves his children (he has a contract with us, too, does he not?).

* No, I will not tell you about this incident.  Don't ask.

(There may be a Part 2 post coming. ...)