Dear Future Husband,
I squeeze my toothpaste from the middle.
It’s true. I’m one of those people, though I never thought I would be. I always pictured myself as the strategically-push-every-last-drop-from-the-bottom person. But alas, God did not make me one of those. He made me a squeeze-from-the-middle person.
Why am I telling you this? First, because if it’s a deal breaker for you, then I’m letting you know up front. Get out while you still can! Second, because this is one of those things that couples don’t realize they’re getting when they sign on the dotted line.
Reading the Fine Print
On the day we say, “I do,” toothpaste methods will be the farthest things from our minds. But in the following weeks, it might not be so trivial. Actually you might really hate it. (We can always have different tubes. I use Colgate anyways. None of that tricolor Aquafresh nonsense.)
But if it’s not the toothpaste, then it will be something else. Like my inability to decide where to go for dinner, or my outrageous collection of shoes, or the way I crunch potato chips. Who knows. Maybe I’ll hate the way you blow your nose, or that you wear the wrong kind of socks, or how you eat popcorn at the theatre. It could be anything.
You see, when you marry me, you marry all of me, mangled toothpaste included. And I marry all of you, even if you do spill popcorn all over the place. I’m planning on bringing 100% of me to our marriage. Nothing less.
Change But Don’t Change
In our culture of romanticism, we forget that the person we marry is a real person with real flaws. And while we should both be moving closer to Christlikeness, we’re still works in progress. Messy ones, albeit, with toothpaste and popcorn smeared around, but we’re getting there.
So while we’ll probably fight about any or all of the above, I’ll still choose to love you. All of you. And in the process we’ll both learn some grace, which perhaps is one of the greater purposes for our marriage.
But in the meantime, you keep being you, in all of your butter-and-salted glory. And I’ll keep squeezing the toothpaste tube from the middle.
Until We Marry,
Emily
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