Life is messy. There are no short-cuts or work arounds you can take in avoiding the messiness.
Take for instance the situation of one of my family members. He married a woman Hungary. Although we were invited to the wedding, travel to Hungary was not in the budget.
I saw pictures and heard how beautiful the ceremony was. It was both romantic and filled with awesomeness.
Things got messy for him when there were some major differences between them. They eventually decided that it was time for the marriage to end.
The messy part was that although they married in Hungary, they were never married in the United States, so legally there was no marriage. When there’s no marriage, there’s no divorce.
Although they had a wedding, consummated their relationship and went on a honeymoon, in the eyes of US law, they weren’t married.
Although legally the lines are clean, now he wants to marry a Catholic woman and it’s messy explaining how he was married but not legally married. This is an important issue for anyone wanting to get married in a Catholic church.
The modern phrase used for such situation is “It’s complicated.”
His ‘messy’ situation came to mind on reading an email a few weeks ago. From the opening sentences it’s clear the reader is facing a messy situation.
“I found out he’d been cheating on me with (younger guys) a few months ago in 2018. Throughout our entire relationship. He’d kept it a secret all these years. I don’t think he considers it cheating…”
Anytime you have a cheater who starts playing word games, things get messy. You find yourself arguing over what is or is not an affair down to little technical details.
In my mind if you had sexual relations or develop strong emotional attachment outside of your marriage, it’s an affair.
I use the adage of “When it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…it’s a duck!”
Likewise arguments over gender, whether or not there was coitus, whether what happened meets the legal definition of an affair or whether the touching was inappropriate only make things messy. They confound rather than clear up things.
Messiness is a breeding ground for denial. Things are often made messy in order to deny what’s really going on. Did they put cherish someone else ahead of you? Did they have relations with someone that belonged to you?
There are times when a few simple questions help cut through messy situations. The problem is that you are in the middle of the situation to the point where you can’t see things clearly.
At the membership site, Restored Lifestyle, you can use the forums for discussing the messes in your life. There are times when others can see a way out of the mess that you can’t see. I encourage you to join today and start un-complicating your situation.
It’s not that you are deficient in any way, you just don’t see all the options. When you are in the middle of situations, it’s hard seeing any way out.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
