The irritation of intimacy

Here is my tribute to Valentine's Day:

Nobody has the potential to irritate you like the people with whom you live. Whether a spouse, a child, a parent, a sibling, a roommate--and there's a reason for it. These are the people who live in your space. Who make demands of your brain, of your time and your energy, and who have the capability and willingness to do all kinds of things within your space that make no sense to you whatsoever.

If we have enough money, we are living at a time and in places where people can increasingly live together and forgo these irritations--to live together without being in each other's space. Maybe everyone has their own rooms, perhaps even with the added retreat avenues of their own televisions, computers, and phones. One can happily close a door rather than suffer the annoyances of another person.

When those physical logistics combine with a culture in which "love" is something that exists to fulfill and bestow happiness upon its owner, we can forget the hidden value of everyday relational irritations.

Because the flip side of letting someone into your space--someone who will frustrate you with their differences, whose needs will encroach on your energy, whose plans will at times completely alter your own--is that irritants can teach things like patience, compromise, and communication. Those differences could take you a couple of steps toward understanding a perspective or a personality unlike your own. That other person's needs could teach you to give, even as they teach you your own limitations.

And the difficulties of allowing someone into your space combined with the level of commitment that a spouse makes to a spouse, or a parent gives to a child--that teaches sacrifice. Sacrifice. A word that I am groaning to type, because Christians seem to throw it around so much that any meaning fell off of it a long time ago.

"Sacrifice" means a death has happened. It could be as small as the death of some plans you'd had for the day, of some rest you thought you'd get, or some activity in which you'd hoped to participate. But it could also mean the death of larger hopes, of something you'd thought you'd do, of ideas you'd had for your own future, of someone you'd imagined yourself becoming. It sounds wrong even as I type it, to say something like that in a culture that values self-actualization above all else. But it's clear that you can't be a husband or a wife in the long term without some of this kind of sacrifice, and you can't parent a child without it either.

The sometimes pain or difficulties or self-denials of intimacy--what could teach us more practically to be like Christ? And yet we can run from it, or at least when we find ourselves in those situations we can assume something must be wrong with our relationship, since those moments are not happy or fulfilling ones. But in reality those moments are symptoms that confirm--yes, indeed, we have allowed someone else's life truly to overlap our own.

But I can't only dwell on the idea of what you could gain in Christlikeness when your spouse or child or parent or sibling or roommate presents you with irritation or pain or difficulty. Because in these relationships, you also will fail. You will misunderstand, you will get angry, you will annoy, you will make demands, you will cause pain.

And in those instances, you grow in yet another important way. You can be humbled. You can be changed, for the better. And, best of all, you can experience the grace of another person bestowed upon you, another person who has actually seen and felt the lash of your lowest self. But who continues to live in your space, and to love you.

Happy Valentine's Day to those who have shared their space with me, and who have given me grace.