Don't weight in relationships

Responsibility and weight

A common phrase about life is that if you aren’t moving forward, you are moving backward. This phrase in essence points out how if you aren’t in some way improving yourself with the time you have in life you are not only standing still and letting time move by you, but you are actively denying the opportunities for your own self-betterment. In other words, you are not just saying no to a possible good, you are saying yes to your current state of imperfection, and this is just as damning. In having a fair deal of both of these processes myself, the closest thing I can find to parallel to this phrase is responsibility and weight.

The first thing I notice every time I put down my responsibilities for a little while these days is that it feels like a physical weight off my shoulders. This is likely due to my viewing of responsibility as an almost literal carrying of one’s cross, but I can easily see others thinking of it as a lightening of their mental burden, a reduction in their stress, or a reduced feeling of unease in their stomach. However you experience responsibility, if you can set it down for a short time, you should be able to notice an almost physical change in how your body feels.

This has become most readily obvious to me during my time with my wife. With so many plans in the future, and my being, in essence, unemployed for the time being, there are almost constant causes for stress (not that I notice them well, I am very much a “go with the flow” individual), and these are regularly brought to the forefront by my wife. Luckily, I have an extremely thoughtful wife, so when she brings these issues bothering her to the forefront, I immediately understand where her concerns are coming from, but it often means I am completely sidelined by worries I didn’t realize existed, and picking those burdens up often adds a rather heavy load for a short time as I attempt to remedy my ineptitude.

With this I have obtained a decent sensitivity to the amount of weight or responsibility upon my shoulders. If you read my last article, you may remember that the gaze of women drastically increases our self-consciousness, which is very closely related to responsibility and stress. Thusly, when I have alone time as my wife does some traveling to visit her family, or go to her occasional salon appointments, I am left with enough time away from this self-consciousness and responsibility to realize several things about how the relationship has changed me and continues to affect how I think about things.

The change wrought by a relationship

Every time she leaves the house on an errand or to visit family (we don’t have a man-cave yet, the apartment is too small)(this doesn’t work when men head to a job, that just changes the responsibilities type), I find myself with that pleasant and lightening feeling of being able to spend a little bit of time doing whatever task it is I find most pleasing. This has recently shifted very much away from things like video games and more towards writing, reading, housekeeping, and physical pursuits like rock climbing. But it also brings a realization. Something always feels slightly off when she is no longer an arm’s reach away.

I have found no other way to describe this feeling than a longing to return to her side so that I can continue to improve in those ways I have found so very meaningful in the past several months. She is like my own personal life coach, not needing to say anything much of the time, but always leading to the most drastic improvements in myself.

In other words, what I most long for once I have my responsibilities reduced or removed is a return to those responsibilities. Sometimes this longing to return to my responsibilities takes a little while to manifest, such as after submitting one of these writings for example, but after whatever initial activity I decided to do, the feeling always returns. That weight that I had grown used to sitting on my shoulders being removed makes me realize what it was doing for me. Carrying something so precious and important to yourself makes you want to not put that weight down.

This feeling and these stresses will likely drastically increase if/when she becomes pregnant, and we begin having to worry about all those million and one things a new life brings to marriage. Strangely enough though, I have been looking forward to the challenges of fatherhood ever since I realized that married life was my life’s calling. Nothing brings me more excitement than all the unknowns of raising children. So hopefully, once my responsibilities increase to include even more of my own family, I will still be bearing them so gladly that I can still hop along in life as I always have.

But what if this love isn’t so precious?

Now this may change in the future. Relationships always grow difficult at some point, and I am almost positive that when that does happen the weight upon my shoulders will drastically change in how it feels. This is like what happened when I first went to college and started squandering time there. I had all the freedom in the world. Responsibilities dropped to a minimum, and I was so busy having a fun time playing League of Legends and Super Smash Brothers Ultimate that I didn’t even really notice this lack of weight on my shoulders. Everything was too interesting for this, the adventure too sweet, the weightlessness too satisfying, the freedom too enticing.

During this time responsibilities felt like such an annoyance. My sensitivity to the weight on my shoulders wasn’t as strong, but I could tell that every time I had to start thinking about a homework assignment or going to mass on a Sunday the responsibility wasn’t carried with any degree of love nor joy. Instead, I sometimes let it bear me to the floor and keep me there. A missed mass here, a poorly done assignment there, and almost never was my studying for tests done. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was regressing hard. From the boisterous and exciting days of high school, I now led a most uninteresting and dull college life.

Looking back on my college days now I have the most regrets in my existence about how I spent my time there. Endless pursuits of things that I knew would not improve myself, or that I knew would actively damage my ability to change in the future. Every single one of these regrets stems from a responsibility shirked, a weight I let fall from my shoulders, or an opportunity I saw but didn’t take advantage of because of the difficulties I might encounter pursuing it.

This is to say, even if the weight doesn’t feel like a good thing to carry, putting that weight down will often not bring you what you are hoping for. Troubled relationships and trouble within relationships are often brought about when these weights are discarded simply due to their heavy or awkward weight on your shoulders. Sometimes it is a problem you should never have gotten into in the first place and could never have predicted, but more often than not the problems in a relationship are brought about because these responsibilities are difficult to manage at the time they are introduced, then put down because we don’t like the weight. Don’t do that. The beauty of relationships is not built upon the wonderful times spent frolicking in the woods or in bed. The beauty is built upon the number of tears soaked into your shoulder, the number of arguments that brought understanding, and the number of embraces that stopped the end of the world.