The 3rd wedding anniversary is often when a couple is aware of the durability of their relationship. That is why leather is the traditional gift for this celebration. Here are some third wedding anniversary ideas and symbols to help you choose gifts associated with your 3rd marriage anniversary.
Two things inspired me to trip across the keyboard instead of take the nap that my yoga training weary self needs, first was a discussion about Patanjali’s sutra on the benefits of distraction during hard times and the second was the search term that turned up today on my blog.
The search?
grief denial through remarriage
Classic.
There is a school of thought in the grief is practically a 12 step program camp that says that anything short of total immersion in the grief “process” is denial.
Oh, okay, a vacation with the kids here and there is fine, but only if one goes all angsty about it because it feels wrong to have fun when someone – a dead someone – isn’t there to have fun too*. Holidays are permissible too if the travel destination is one that the dead person loved. Plenty of garment-rending opportunities in emotional minefields made tangible. Very good grief work for the committed.
But I heard this a lot in my day, remarriage before your kids were grown or a decade or two had gone by – whichever came first – were sure signs that a person was “running away from his/her grief”. And there’s a footrace I’d like to see. Outrunning one’s self is an Olympic caliber event.
Here’s what baffles me – beyond the idea that grief requires active, directed participation – the act of dating, falling in love and remarrying are probably three of the top ten biggest drivers home of the undisputable fact that your spouse has died.
Sure, there are stories here and there of people who rushed into marriage and “came to their senses” in the ensuing months or first years and then divorced. I am not convinced that grief was the blinder or the resurrector of good sense. These were people, generally speaking, who never had or seldom employed sense pre-widowhood.
People who don’t do well in the dating world after a divorce or death probably didn’t date at all or very well prior to their marriages.
Tragedy doesn’t rend you. You aren’t a different person. Tragedy – like a yoga practice – just exposes deficiencies that were already present. Or in some cases, forces recognition. People tend to drift, or coast, through life once they’ve snuggled into the equivalent of a gerbil’s nest. They might have doubts, dissatisfaction or realize they aren’t living in accordance to what they’ve been taught or believe, but they are content, warm and cozy, and that’s enough. Until it’s not. Hard times shine bright harsh light on our realities.
So what do the Sutra’s say?
The Yoga Sutras are amazing. It’s like the Bible or the Koran minus the fairy stories. Unvarnished universal truth that is no different today than thousands and thousands of years ago. It predates Christ or Mohamed or Buddha. Human beings and their basic “issues” are as predictable as the trauma/drama of teenagers. Self-interest is hardwired.
According to the sutra’s the distraction is the life obstacle and what you do to get through, around, over or under it is the solution. Taking that and applying it? Falling in love again is the key to overcoming the death of a spouse.
Maybe not “the” key. Patanjali provides a long list of “distractions” that a person can immerse themselves in when obstacles come along. An asana practice or meditation being among the ways a person can go about righting themselves after being upended, but at the end of the list he concludes that whatever a person chooses and devotes him/herself to will serve equally well. It’s individual, so some divorced/widowed people might choose to rebuild their lives as a single. They cultivate careers, hobbies and children. They volunteer. They nurture friendships. How’s that different from choosing to love and recouple? It isn’t unless you factor risk because there is always risk when people connect with each other. I would argue that there is risk in going it alone as one can never know if the safety net he/she weaves will hold over the length of life any more than recoupled folk do.
But it’s a fascinating discussion, isn’t it. And to think, Patanjali wrote it all down for the edification of others before Buddha sat under a tree or St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland or John Paul II ignored pedophilia in the priesthood so he could be adored. Boggles the mind.
*And seriously, where is the glorious after-life in all this lamentation? Sometimes I wonder if people who proclaim a religious belief in the here-after have less faith than Thomas. One would think all these dearly departed had been packed off to a hell dimension or something.
One of the themes that runs through The Girls from Ames (which I just finished last night) is dating, finding the right and wrong men, marriage, divorce and more dating. As far as women have come, and I am told it’s a “long way, baby”, much of our lives is eaten up in the pursuit of coupling. The author notes the “girls” boyfriends and romantic ups and downs as far back as elementary school.
I don’t have a romantic past that stretches back that far. I crushed on guys certainly as a girl and teen, but I was shy, very fat and too ambivalent about the whole thing for there to be much to talk about. College was pretty much the same. I thought, and I don’t think I was unique, that someone would just “find me”. See me walking or in class or dancing in a club and know that I was the one for them. I hung hopefully on the edges and, of course, nothing happened. The few times I stepped up and laid my cards on the table – I was rejected – which is ironic when you consider that by stating my feelings and intentions openly I wound up married – twice. I was ahead of my time, I suppose.
One of the women in the book, Karla, was married and divorced with a baby in her mid-twenties when she met her second husband. It was one of those “just sorta knew” relationships. The other women in the book hold her relationship up as the ideal. It certainly is a meeting of partners where each one is more concerned about the other than themselves and see downs times as just as normal and necessary to a relationship as up times. Ebb and flow. If you can’t float a boat on both, failure is a given.
Two things that dovetailed this morning, one was an FB status update about Camp Widow. Some of my FB friends belong to a bereavement group that holds yearly “conventions” to deal with widow issues. Two of their speakers, according to the update, will be talking about the “how” of recoupling. There is a “how”? Specifically? Hmmm. And I read a widow grog that seems to be mostly about dealing/rebuilding and much of what the bloggers there write about are the disappointments and challenges of rebuilding. The post today dealt with the anger and frustration of dating again. Mostly about comparing. I am probably just revealing my too practical side here, but why compare at all? Or make lists?
One of the girls in the book divorced in the last five years and is searching for the kind of marriage that Karla and the others seem to have. Operative word being “seem” and has a list, comparison dates/shops. But how can you find someone when you after assessed yourself and let go of who you were?
That’s key to moving on and new love, isn’t it?
I didn’t compare Rob to Will. Even if there had been a basis for doing so, I made up my mind to put Will and our relationship in the past. Nothing good would come of my trying to recreate that time or using my old self as a basis for future happiness.
There is the sutra argument that our true selves are eternal. Regardless of our current perceptions of who we are, which is based largely on the world around us, we are always us deep down. It’s necessary then to not rely over much on past actions, relationships, and such, as touchstones. The past has limited use in determining present day direction.
I knew long before Will died that I needed to be married again. I felt unfinished in a way that transcends the ability to put the feeling to proper words. There was someone out there and I was meant to love again. So when the time came, I put Will in his place in my past and I left him there. He had no purpose in my future. He was done, another piece of my foundation.
One of the things I loved about Karla’s story was the way her second husband, Bruce, totally embraced being her daughter’s father. I am puzzled by people who don’t dive in as a parent or people who refuse to allow their new spouses to be parents. Like a child can have too much parental support and love? My own opinion is that a potential spouse who can’t love your child isn’t a good pick and that children aren’t mature enough, or have the ability to see past their self-centeredness to know what is best for them sometimes. Loving a person with children means committing to parenting too. Otherwise, forget it.
All the talk – on blogs and talk shows and in books – about the need to be single, find yourself, learn to be you, blah, blah, blah – is directly contradicted by the fact that we spend most of our lives searching for love, maintaining/nurturing love and lamenting/longing for it when it ends. I don’t think this is a dysfunction. It is human. Alone is not the norm though it certainly can be unavoidable given the way society works anymore.
I identified with the girls in the book who felt there was something wrong with them as teens and twenty-somethings searching, putting their hearts out there and being rejected. I know better now. There is nothing wrong with me. I was being me and the rejection wasn’t personal really. It was steering me – too slowly it felt like – to where I was meant to be. We can be so impatient. We think we are ready and we’re not, or we think we need someone who is merely a want. Needs and wants stubbornly don’t match up a lot because our true selves are hard-hearted on our behalf.
I totally believe that we choose our destinies for whatever reason yet to be revealed and that it’s the human imposed perception of time that keeps us from realizing that we have so much more time in the larger scheme of things. Even if I live to be 110, the years are a blip in terms of my true self’s existence. The time I have spent on this plane with Will and Rob is just a drop in the bucket of the time our souls know each other, and we must carry little bits of each other around or else how would we know each other again?
Forgive the rambling. I am in the throes of yet another allergy attack. Two nights in a row. It appears I am allergic to cleaning solvents which is going to make cleaning a challenge and avoiding them in the world a priority – though how I am going to manage, I haven’t quite worked out yet.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the whole love and relationship thing. Without them, do we have lives at all really?
anniegirl1138 