Chasing After Problems

There is a glow of purity and joy on the faces of the guests as they reluctantly depart from the wedding hall into the cold of night. The older bride is happier than she has ever been in her entire lifetime. It is her special day. She is the queen who has finally found her king.   The older groom is also feeling a special joy that he has never known. Before tonight, both of them had to pass through the lonely years of not knowing that this day would come.

A cousin of the bride needed an escort home.  It was an 18 block walk on a bitterly cold and windy night. There was nobody to escort her so the bride told her husband that they must take her home. The groom reluctantly agreed because he wasn’t dressed to take a 36 block walk in the freezing cold. He was dressed for the 2 block walk to their new apartment; and all that he wants right now is to be alone with his new wife in their very own home. The new bride is donning a fur coat and she doesn’t feel the cold. She’s so happy she could skip through the street.

With each step he feels more resentful. Before long he’s angry with her for subjecting him to the cold. Then something else occurs to him that he hadn’t given a thought to all night: his wife had disrespected him during the wedding by asking him to bring her this and bring her that – what was he her bus boy?  It didn’t register with him at the time; but hadn’t she really treated him like her servant?

Finally they’re home and he is trying to speak to her. Someone important once told him: “You must always be honest with your wife about your feelings.” So he tells her, gently, that perhaps she didn’t notice that he wasn’t wearing a coat. Well, that was all he needed to say for her to have a complete meltdown. She cried all night and couldn’t bring herself to speak to him the entire next day.

As I listened to his story I wondered how Hashem in his infinite wisdom expected my friend to grow from these events. He’s not a beginner. He’s worked hard on himself and overcame his fear of getting married. So when he called, I knew he wasn’t just coming to complain about his “inconsiderate” wife. He knew that he was missing something. There was something in his emotional reaction to his wife that he didn’t understand. How did his happy mood plummet so suddenly? What had triggered his overreaction? How can he prevent this from happening again?

The first thing that l told him is how common it is for unresolved problems to run away from a wedding as joyous as his. When a person is happy he forgets about the internal issues that he still needs to work on. His gloomy problems know it’s no use to attack him when he’s surrounded by the holiness, purity and joy of a Jewish wedding. I told him that it was only after the party was over and he was out on the street that his problems felt safe enough to come out of hiding and attack him.

Why did he feel such resentment toward his new wife?

The healthy part of him understood that she may have “ordered” him around more than she usually does – but not because she wants a “slave,” but rather because she believes so much in his love. She simply trusted that he, more than anybody else would want to cater to her during these most special few hours of her life.

The problematic part of him tells him: “What did you get yourself into with this woman? She’s a self-centered dictator who will turn you into her errand boy just like your father did, just like your mother did and just like your teachers did!  If you stay with her she’s going to wear the pants in the family – you’re going to feel like the woman in the family because she makes more money than you do and because you’re about to move into her apartment which is bigger and better furnished than yours was!”

He had become a good communicator. So he picked a good time to sit down with his wife to have a talk.  He told her everything that he knew about his childhood insecurities that had mushroomed into his adult insecurities about himself and his ability to support a wife and family.  She reassured him that “what’s hers is his” and that she didn’t marry him for money; she married him for his beautiful heart. Slowly he’s starting to relax and be his natural spontaneous self around her. He’s starting to understand that Hashem gave him a successful woman so that he can feel like a successful man – but not in the way that American society measures manliness but in the way the Torah does.

When a person is able to face his problems and clarify them with the light of truth, if his will is strong enough, he can go beyond just being happy. Instead of waiting for the next time his problems attack him he chases after those problems and pulls them from the places where they hide. He identifies and clarifies those problems and, in the process, he clarifies his resistances to pursuing them. Once he talks things out, the problems are actually leveraged to his benefit and actually increase his happiness.