THOUGHTS: WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY DIVORCE

Do you want me to tell you what I learned from my divorce: Marriages become beautiful when two people embrace the only good reason to get married: to practice the daily sacrifice of their egos.You were born with a good and beautiful heart, and it will never leave you. But you started to doubt if your heart was good enough.At first, we only use the ego-wall to keep people out. But eventually, as we grow up, we get tired of hiding fearfully and we decide the best defense is a good offense. We put cannons on our ego-wall and we start firing. For some people that looks like anger. For other people, it looks like gossip and judgment and divisiveness. One of my favorite ego-cannons is to pretend everyone on the outside of my wall is wrong. It makes me feel right and righteous, but really it just keeps me safe inside of my ideas

The entire purpose of marriage is to dismantle your ego-wall, brick by brick, until you are fully available to the person you love. Open. Vulnerable. Dangerously united.People have sex because for a moment at the climax of it, their mind is without walls, the ego goes away, and they feel free and fully connected. With sex, the feeling lasts for only a moment. But if you commit yourself to marriage, you commit yourself to the long, painful, joyous work of dismantling your ego-walls for good. Then, the moment can last a lifetime.

What’s the secret to a happy marriage? Marry someone who has also embraced the only good reason to get married. Someone who will commit to dying alongside you—not in fifty years, but daily, as they dismantle the walls of their ego with you.Someone who will be more faithful to you than they are to their own safety.Someone willing to embrace the beauty of sacrifice, the surrender of their strength, and the peril of vulnerability.In other words, someone who wants to spend their one life stepping into a crazy, dangerous love with you and only you.With my walls down,