I know. Weird, right?
We love to read. I mean really love it. I was an English major after all.
Sometimes I'll be reading a book and see something that really strikes me and connects to my marriage. Here's one:
Right now I'm reading Les Miserables. It's abridged-334 pages. I couldn't handle the 1400 pages of the original!
In the book, the main character, Jean Valjean, has turned his former hardened, criminal life around (though he is still hunted by a crazed policeman), and is now living obscurely and raising an orphan, Cosette.
Life with Cosette has brought him happiness he had not dared to hope for. However, when she becomes a young teenager, he notices for the first time that she is becoming pretty, and this was the beginning of the possibility that she, one day, would want to leave him and marry a man.
The story says, "[Valjean] felt a deep and undefinable anguish in his heart....He felt that it was a change in a happy life, so happy that he dared not stir for fear of disturbing something....Loved by Cosette, he was content! He said to himself: 'How beautiful she is! What will become of me?'"
For those of us in a dating, engaged, or married relationship, we are very happy with the idea of our lover finding happiness in us.
I'm not talking about affairs. What I mean is the things that our significant other enjoys or dreams of.
It might be a dream of theirs, or some activity that they enjoy a great deal, or some passion for or hobby in some subject. These are especially threatening when they are activities or dreams that make us uncomfortable. If we let them enjoy and pursue those things will that shove us out of their affections?
But here is what Valjean and I didn't know until later: one of the greatest joys of an intimate relationship is to be the vehicle through which your loved one can pursue their greatest joys.
And life, and I'd say God, made it so that our love is always enriched when we join with and support the joy of our beloved's.
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