FRIENDS WITH EFFORT

Intentional efforts in any relationship was something I was greatly unfamiliar with. Every friendship I fostered, both male and female had always been effortless.

The first four months of my marriage I forfeited due to the comparisons. I singlehandedly robbed us of our honeymoon phase because I believed that friendship could only come in one form, easy. I measured the authenticity of who we were by the standards of my previous relationships.

Naturally, Rico and I are very different. While I am a woman that has never had a shortage of words. Rico is a man who chooses his wisely. I’m often conflicted between Jesus and Trap, he’s the human Shazam for your favorite baptist spirituals.

I punished him for being himself. I punished us because this was a friend I had to actually learn. The survival of this friendship required being intentional. I didn’t have the luxury of having the “what’s understood doesn’t need to be explained” mentality. Assumptions would have driven and killed our relationship.

My dad one day shared with me “what you feast your eyes on, you will soon gravitate to”. My eyes were steadfast on everything I disliked about him, me and us. And it was true, those things became like a magnetic force. The things I wasn’t even looking for, began to look for me. If we had any chance of making it our first year my eyes needed a new focus and it needed to be him.

I had to neglect this code of effortlessness I swore by and simply become a student. I needed to feast my eyes on the things that I loved and appreciated about him because those things were true. Regardless of how I felt, how he made me feel or what I lacked in feelings; I couldn’t discredit who he was or what we had because it was different. Not bad. Just different.

So I started. Every day. I texted him one thing I appreciated about him and one thing I liked. Some days it was deep and other days I struggled to find something cause he had made me mad. But those things became my target. While I was looking for perhaps a change in Rico, I immediately begin to see a change in me. I found myself just really liking dude and developing the tools I needed to foster this relationship, patience.

It’s a shame to think of what I could have jeopardized if I continued to allow familiarity to dictate my judgment. It goes to show, how it’s been doesn’t have to be what it is.

Here’s to kissing “how I think it’s s’pose to be” goodbye!