The Person I Wish You Were

Learning to love the person in front of us, not the person we keep wishing they’d become.

Well, Damn.

I came across a quote from Leo Tolstoy the other day that stopped me for a minute.

“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.”

Well, damn.

There are some quotes you read and think, That’s nice.

And then there are the ones that quietly walk into your house, sit down at your kitchen table and start pointing at things.

This one did that.

Because loving someone as they are sounds pretty simple until you realize how often we love people with an asterisk attached.

I love you, but…

I love you, but I wish you wouldn’t do that. I love you, but I wish you’d see things the way I do. I love you, but I wish you’d be a little more organized. A little more patient. A little less stubborn. A little more adventurous.

Or maybe a little less adventurous.

Maybe just…different.

Forty Years Will Teach You a Few Things

After almost forty years of marriage, I have to admit I’ve had some experience with this.

Jan and I have been together long enough that we’ve had plenty of opportunities to discover things about each other that we didn’t necessarily order off the menu.

That’s marriage.

You don’t just marry the person. Eventually, you meet the habits, the quirks, the moods, the routines and all those little things that somehow didn’t make the first few dates.

And somewhere along the way, you realize something important.

The person you fell in love with is not a finished product.

Neither are you.

I’ve also discovered that after forty years, you get pretty good at knowing which battles are worth fighting.

Sometimes Jan and I can disagree about something, look at each other, and both know exactly how the conversation is going to end.

Nowhere.

So one of us eventually says something like, “Fine.”

Which, in a marriage, doesn’t always mean fine.

It can mean, I love you more than I care about winning this argument.

That’s not a bad place to arrive.

People Are Not Home Improvement Projects

And maybe that’s the part of Tolstoy’s quote that got me.

We spend a lot of our lives trying to improve things. Fix the house. Fix the lawn. Patch the drywall. Fix the leaky faucet.

I’m particularly guilty of this. Give me a weekend and a Home Depot, and I’ll try to square up anything that looks a little crooked.

The problem comes when we carry that same attitude into relationships. We see something that doesn't fit our plans, and out comes the mental toolbox.

Maybe if I explain it one more time. Maybe if I point it out a little differently. Maybe if I just keep bringing it up for the next twenty years…

I’ve learned something as I’ve gotten older.

People are not home improvement projects.

And thank God for that.

I was reminded of this recently when we remodeled our bathroom. My sister-in-law Kris couldn’t believe Jan agreed to a single-sink vanity.

Her reasoning was pretty simple.

She knows me.

Apparently, Kris couldn’t understand how Jan could willingly give up the opportunity to have her own sink when she’s married to a guy who is, in her words, enough of a slob to make a second sink seem like a survival necessity.

I can’t really argue with her.

I suppose Jan could have insisted on two sinks. She could have drawn a line in the bathroom tile and declared, This is your side. Stay on it.

Instead, after almost forty years, she apparently decided she knew what she was getting.

That’s love, I guess.

Or extremely low expectations.

Maybe both.

Because imagine being married to somebody who was constantly trying to remodel you.

I’d have been condemned years ago.

The Asterisk

The funny thing is, we don’t usually think of ourselves as trying to change people.

We call it helping.

We call it encouraging.

We call it communicating.

Sometimes we even call it loving.

But occasionally it’s just wanting somebody to make our lives a little easier by becoming the person we had in mind.

That’s where things get interesting.

Because there is a difference between saying, I don’t like what you’re doing, and saying, I need you to become somebody else.

Now, I'm not saying you have to like everything somebody does. I'm certainly not saying you put up with somebody treating you badly. Sometimes you need to draw a line. I'm talking about the little stuff. The stuff that makes you think, Why in the hell do you do that?

But we can disagree with somebody without deciding they’re wrong.

We can be disappointed in a decision without deciding the person who made it is a disappointment.

We can wish somebody would do something differently without turning that wish into a requirement for our love.

We Don’t Know the Whole Story

That distinction gets harder as we get older.

We’ve accumulated opinions. We’ve developed routines. We’ve figured out how we like things. We’ve spent decades becoming exactly who we are.

Then we look at somebody we love and wonder why they didn’t arrive at the same conclusions we did.

Maybe that’s the problem.

We think because we know somebody, we know everything about them.

We know what they say.

We know what they do.

We know what we see.

But here's the thing. We don't always know what's going on underneath it. We see the reaction, but we don't necessarily see what got somebody there.

The worry they’re carrying, the disappointment they haven’t mentioned, the memory they still think about, the insecurity they hide, the reason they reacted the way they did.

We look at somebody from the outside and convince ourselves we know the whole story. We usually know about three pages of a 300-page book.

And maybe loving somebody means leaving a little room for the parts of their story we can’t see.

Then There’s the Guy in the Mirror

I’ve also been thinking about how this works with ourselves.

We’re pretty good at doing this backward.

We spend years wishing we were somebody else. A little thinner. A little smarter. A little more successful. A little more confident.

We look back at the person we used to be in our twenties or thirties and wish we’d made better choices, spent less time worrying, or picked a different path. Then we look ahead at some imaginary, perfected version of ourselves we think we’re still supposed to become.

Somewhere in between those two ghosts, we forget to meet the person standing right in front of us.

Ourselves.

We inspect our own lives with the exact same critical eye we turn on others, constantly looking for what needs to be overhauled instead of granting ourselves a little grace for just making it through the day.

Maybe acceptance isn't giving up. Maybe it's just admitting that reality isn't always going to cooperate with us.

This is who I am.

This is who you are.

We can grow. We can change. We can apologize. We can become better.

But we don’t have to become somebody else’s version of better.

That’s different.

Maybe That’s What Love Is

And maybe that’s what Tolstoy was getting at.

Real love probably isn't blind at all. After forty years, I'm pretty sure it's the opposite. You see plenty. You just get better at deciding what matters.

It sees the flaws. It sees the annoying habits. It sees the differences. It sees the history. It sees the person on the bad days as well as the good ones.

And somehow says:

I see you.

Not I see the person I want you to be.

You.

That's a pretty big thing when you think about it.

So I’ve been wondering about something.

How many people in our lives are we still trying to change?

Our spouse.

Our kids.

Our friends.

Our brothers and sisters.

Maybe even the guy in the mirror.

And what would happen if, just for a little while, we stopped trying to turn them into the person we think they should be and simply spent some time getting to know the person they already are?

Because maybe that’s the real confession.

Sometimes the person standing in front of us isn’t the problem.

It’s the person we keep wishing they would become.

And maybe love isn’t about finally getting somebody to fit into our idea of who they should be.

Maybe it’s having the courage to look at them exactly as they are…

and deciding they’re worth loving anyway.

Even when they leave the cabinet door hanging wide open.

Even when they don’t put the tool back where it belongs.

Even when they disagree with you.

Especially then.

Thank God You’re You

Because someday, if we’re lucky, someone will look at us the same way.

And I think most of us would like to be loved not for the person somebody hopes we’ll become…

but for the imperfect, unfinished, occasionally irritating human being we already are.

Maybe that's what forty years teaches you. You don't get to pick somebody and then spend the next forty years remodeling them into the person you had in mind. Believe me, I've remodeled enough bathrooms. I don't need another project.

You get to choose them.

And then you get to know them.

Really know them.

And maybe, if you’re lucky, somewhere along the way you stop asking, “Why can’t you be more like this?”

And start thinking,

“Thank God you’re you.”