What kind of fool?

I’ve always prided myself on being smart. One step ahead of the game. I see what’s coming, nothing surprises me. I understand how it all works.

Usefully, I applied this tool to my marriage. I knew all about my husband. He was a kind, caring, sensitive guy, who saw my heart. I loved that about him.

He hadn’t had soft porn pictures in his room as a teenager, he didn’t drool over other girls. He was keen to discover me, but wanted to wait until we got married to have sex, he was interested in spending time with me. I had hit the jackpot!

But when we got married, it seemed the price that I had to pay for all that was that he just wasn’t very interested in sex. He had a low libido. That’s what we discovered during sexual difficulties on our honeymoon. While he’d been pretty keen to explore in a “safe” way before we got married, after, it didn’t seem to be there for him.

Now I’m smart. If anyone else had told me this story, I would have known that something was up. But I’d tried to pin him down on many things, and it really seemed true. I suggested not using condoms to make it more intense, he wasn’t phased either way. I asked about porn use, and masturbation, he said he did a bit before we got married, but not now. He preferred to sleep. Eventually we put it down to satisfaction lasting a long time for him.

What kind of fool believes her husband who suddenly turns out to be disinterested in sex after marriage?

My dissatisfaction was prolific. I held myself above him – there was something wrong with him, he wasn’t a normal man and I was cheated out of the husband that I should have had.

Until one day, out of the blue, he told me that he’d lied. Due to extreme feelings of incompetence when trying to learn how to have sex, for the last 12 years he had masturbated and used pornography weekly, rather than making love to me.

My world fell apart.

The one where I was the righteous, innocent, hard-done-by party.

He asked my forgiveness for making our marriage the way it had been. He admitted this freely without any likelihood of being discovered. More than that, he feared that when he told me, I would leave. He did it to save our relationship.

And now I had to ask myself a new question:

What kind of fool is married to a man for 12 years and doesn’t know the first thing about his heart?

How in all this time, had I missed the shame he was carrying? The pain he felt when he wasn’t good enough at something, so bad he would withdraw from it completely? How had I missed this strength of courage that emerged when he made this confession to me? Who was this man? Did I know him at all?

“So are wise people really better off than fools?” (Ecclesiastes 6:8) 

“Stop deceiving yourselves. If you think you are wise by this world’s standards, you need to become a fool to be truly wise. ¹⁹ For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As the Scriptures say, “He traps the wise in the snare of their own cleverness.” (1 Corinthians 3:18-19) If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth.” (1 John 1:8)

This was not the beginning of our journey towards true love. It was the middle. We had started on an intensive journey of relationship therapy three years before. 9 years before that we had got married. We had been dating for 5 years before that, and friends for a few more years.

Looking back there’s nothing I would change about any of the years of our journey. Things do not come to light all in one go. His journey had led him to see things that he was holding in the way of our relationship. My faults became more evident because of it. The way I belittled him for his lack of “manliness”, the way I made him feel that I was too good for him, and he had let me down. While ever I was above him, we could not have the passionate relationship that I desired.

And so, by accepting our foolishness in thinking that we knew all there was to know about ourselves and each other, we became fools in love. Through this, we found the wisdom of choosing love over blame and the beauty of discovering another perfectly imperfect being.

Ready to become a fool in love? Join The Relationship Workshop!

Photo by Pedro Dias: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-with-face-paint-wearing-black-and-white-striped-top-8661986/

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