Your Relationship Is One Of A Kind

Your Relationship Is One of a Kind

The very hairs on your head are all numbered.

Matthew 10:30

Some call it your temperament. Some call it your nature or your character. Mystics call it your spirit. Whatever you call it, we all have one, and like a fingerprint, each one is totally and completely one of a kind. In spite of all the similarities we share as human beings, that tiny 0.1 percent difference in our genes makes each of us unique. How? Because we inherit three billion pairs of nucleotides, or chemical bases of genetic information, from our mom and our dad. So even a 0.1 percent difference is still three million chemical distinctions. And that’s a lot!

It’s tough to comprehend. Think of it this way: there are more than three million differences between your genome and anyone else’s, and it’s these three million different sources of genetic information that make your personality exceptional.

Of course, the same holds true for your spouse. Your marriage brings together two completely unique and special personalities. There has never been a combination like you two before. In all of human history, marriage has never witnessed your inimitable combinations of personalities. Your relationship is unprecedented. It is unmatched.

That’s why you may have found that what seems to work wonders for another couple doesn’t seem to help the two of you much at all. We have some friends who married about the same time we did, almost twenty-five years ago. If you ask them what keeps their marriage strong, they’ll tell you that they have learned to never fight.

“We have frank discussions, but we never raise our voices,” one of them will say. “We’ve learned to discipline ourselves, and we always count to ten when that starts to happen.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Les counters. “Is that humanly possible in married life?”

“It works for us,” they say with a smile.

And it does. They’re a very happy couple. But Les and I will be the first to tell you that doesn’t jibe with our own married life. Not that we have frequent yelling matches, not at all. We’re grateful that we’ve learned to curb much of our conflict over the years, but that has had little to do with counting to ten.

The point is that every couple is unique. It’s what caused German poet Heinrich Heine to liken marriage to “the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented!” So what would you two say makes you the most unique as a couple? In other words, when you consider how God hardwired your personalities and how the two of you come together, what makes your relationship matchless?

A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.

—Anne Taylor Fleming