Day 40: Survival of the Both

I said; "It doesn't feel like you're trying to be a better husband."

I hate these words. These are the words that wives don't want to say because it means we've given up on his voluntarily changing and am now relying on the basic elements of peer pressure and guilt to get our point across. And what happened next is what always happens; he launches into his defensive list of acts of improvement and I counter with my own. He rubbed my back, I made him cookies, he picked up my laundry off the bathroom floor, I let him buy a humongous tree, he let me decorate it in (what I am learning this instant) what he thinks is tacky gold and silver. I (still) don't complain about the freezing temperature in our house. He raised it five degrees a week ago and I didn't even notice. What started as a well-meaning opener has turned into a binge of boasts and thinly veiled complaints and I feel bloated with a self-righteousness that has turned bitter as I swallow.

Maybe I've got it all wrong. I want to cram enough love into these one hundred days hoping it will completely redefine my marriage. I want to see measurable change and results so drastic that other people stop and stare. I want to be the glowing ones. But I didn't consider the truth of it all. That underneath our shiny faces and good intentions, we remain the same people we always were. Humans. Faulty, selfish creatures of survival. And who do I think I am to try and change a thousand years of humanity with one hundred days of love? It's not enough to alter my habits and frame of mind. If this experiment is going to amount to more than a dozen bottles of cranberry pills on my bathroom sink, then I must look at my husband and pull him underneath my shiny smile and (mostly) good intentions. If I make him my own, then perhaps my own survival will be tied into his and in our very living we will become more of one.

I just haven't the slightest idea how to do that.