I don’t fully know how to explain
this, but when a woman becomes intimate with a man, she can sense how he really
feels about her and just how safe she is with him, whether she realizes it
consciously or not. From the start of our intimacy, I knew at some level that I
was loved, cherished, respected and safe with him, even though it took me a
while to realize that consciously. Knowing those things had a lot to do with my
ability to trust him enough to become fully open about the emotional pain and
junk in my life.
Now, I don’t want to give anyone the
idea that our relationship has been trouble free. Believe me, it hasn’t. We’ve
had arguments and a couple of times we’ve yelled at each other. But, we worked
through the problems and are better off for it. The key here though, is that we
were both willing to work through the problems and forgive each other.
The one really big argument we had
occurred on a night when David went out with a friend, Karen. I had told him before he
went out that I needed him that night. He told me he’d be home by a specific
time and we would be able to spend some time together then. I had a feeling
before David walked out the door that he wouldn’t be home at the time he said.
He was originally supposed to just take her out for coffee, but Karen called
him at the last minute and asked if he’d mind taking her to a shelter where
some people she knew held a service and they might need her to play the piano.
When David didn’t come home within 15
or 20 minutes of the time he said he’d be home, I tried to call him on his cell
phone. When he didn’t answer, I started to get upset. By the time David got
home, over an hour after he said he would, I was furious. I waited up for him
in his bedroom and confronted him the instant he walked in. David tried to
explain, but I was too angry to really listen. Finally he told me that if I was
so needy I couldn’t wait, then I might as well walk out the door and not come
back. As a man, he could not handle that kind of neediness on a regular basis.
That’s when I told him that I had been sitting on my needs for a few days because
every time I’d thought we were going to have time together, something
interfered. He understood and I finally calmed down enough to be reasonable
about the situation. Since that night, I have not allowed things to interfere
with getting my needs met, unless I truly have no choice. I also learned to
express my needs to David, even when we couldn’t be together for some reason. I
learned to tell him what I’m feeling and to express my emotions. This all
helped prevent the kind of buildup of emotional need, which fueled our biggest
argument.
There have also been times when we’ve
argued because no matter how hard we tried, we seemed to be misunderstanding
one another.
Sometimes David chewed me out for
things I should be doing. For instance, I never asked him to pray for me when I
had a headache. Given that God had not healed me when people prayed for me
before about my headaches; I never thought to ask David. I do now.
A lot has happened since the day I
decided to move into David’s house. I’ve changed and in the process, I also
learned about living with a man who knows who he is and is capable of being the
man of the house; not a wimp who can’t stand on his own two feet, much less be
a tower of strength for a spouse. I learned that even that kind of man has his own
set of pressures and weaknesses, which means there are times when he needs
someone to lean on, but this isn’t an all the time thing. I learned the reality
of the line in the Wedding Song, which states “woman draws her strength
from man and gives it back again.” For that is one that has been happening for
me since I moved in. It’s been difficult at times, but it’s also been
wonderful.
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