Meeting My Wife - Elevate with Yung Pueblo
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My wife, Sara, and I first met at Wesleyan University. She was an incoming freshman and I was a sophomore. We pretty quickly found friendship in each other and would talk for long hours into the night. While the immediate connection between us was quite strong and undeniable, neither of us thought about becoming more than friends until a few months later, when I realized I was developing deeper feelings for her. Interestingly, our friends thought we were already a couple because we spent so much time together, but the truth was that we just kept seeking each other out to share more of our life stories. Even so, I was incredibly nervous about talking to her about the new feelings I felt for her.
I also noticed that I wasn’t the only guy seeking her attention, so I was unsure if she even thought of me as more than a friend. But one night in early November I gathered the courage to finally tell her. I knew from our time together that she hadn’t been in a relationship before, and I was probably more than a little excited when I was finally able to tell her my feelings, but I was still caught by surprise when her first reaction was to say she needed space to think about all this. Later that night, she told me she was ready to talk, but the first thing she said when we met up was, “What are you thinking long term?” I was so confused by her question that I blurted out, “Do you even like me?” Fortunately, she did, but she hadn’t wanted to risk our friendship for a short fling (we laugh about that moment to this day).
We said we loved each other only a few weeks later. It just slipped out. But we had absolutely no idea how to build a healthy relationship together. Between the two of us, there was a grand total of zero emotional maturity. We would argue often, constantly swaying between the two extremes of being wildly in love and blaming each other for the inner pain we did not know how to manage. Even though we talked a lot, we communicated poorly. Our fights were drawn out because we both focused on winning. Neither of us had the patience to be the bigger person.
For years, neither of us could fully see, let alone communicate to the other, how so much of the friction between us was caused by the unobserved and unresolved tension that dwelled in us as individuals. Because we both lacked self-awareness, we had trouble seeing each other clearly. Even though we were together for years, there was always a distance between us. A lot of that was due to how dishonest I was being with myself about the sadness and anxiety that would periodically roar through my mind and push me further into reinforcing unhealthy habits. We both desired control in different ways and blamed each other for things that were unreasonable. The first six years of our relationship felt like we were moving in and out of a hurricane together. Many times we almost called it quits, but the connection between us kept us coming back. Today, I am so grateful that we kept trying. Now we feel very fortunate that we met so young and have gotten to be together for so long, but it was the healing work that we both undertook that saved our relationship and made it the pillar of strength that it is now in our lives.
It wasn’t until we both started meditating that things really changed. Interestingly, we were each drawn to the same style of meditation and still find it fits our individual conditioning so well. We both began seeing that our relationship with ourselves as individuals was a total mess and that a lot of our behavior was not authentic at all. Much of it was composed of reactions driven by past trauma or intense emotions that we had accumulated over time. All these blind habit patterns were getting in the way of loving each other well.
Meditation has this critical ability to build self-awareness, which helped us notice when we were blaming each other for things that actually had nothing to do with the other. Slowly, we both started noticing how our inner tension would try to push us into bending logic to find a way to make it the other one’s fault. Granted, sometimes we would certainly make mistakes that irritated each other, but many times we would look to make some trouble while our moods were low. Slowly, the constant finger pointing turned into “I want you to know that I don’t feel good right now,” which is a cue for the other that we could use support and compassion at the moment.
There were essential qualities that meditation cultivated in our separate minds. We both started enhancing our ability not to get pulled into immediate reactive impulses, to watch the rush of emotion, rather than getting dragged into it and making problems worse than they already were. The ability to pause and respond, instead of immediately reacting, was strengthened over time through our meditation, which taught us to observe the fire without giving it more fuel to burn.
We both began understanding ourselves better. We came to deeply know what we wanted out of life, what we aspired to, how our past was affecting our present, and how our old conditioning clouded our ability to be fully receptive to each other. We saw our fears and learned how it was much more valuable to sit with them than to try to bury them or run away from them. We learned how, if you wanted to build freedom in your mind, you would have to take the route of honesty. We saw how the harshness in our minds stopped us from being gentle with each other in real life. The connection between what was happening in our minds and how we treated each other became shockingly clear. But this also gave us hope, because as our minds become less dense, patience, love, and selflessness were able to flow more easily between the two of us.
Excerpt from my book Lighter, which is temporarily 39% off.
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