My father's advice....

Father's Day I typed a post about my father and how he gave me the best advice before I got married and how it has always stuck in my mind and basically it's why I'm still married after all these years. So what was the advice??, people have asked.

But first let me tell you something my husband thought was funny. When we went over to my parents house to tell them that we were getting married, my father and my soon-to-be-husband took a walk around the back of the property to talk. My husband was a bit nervous cause he figured my dad was going to be questioning him and trying to find out if he was good enough for his daughter, etc. My father looked at him and asked "Are you sure you know what you're doing?!"...."Do you realize how hard she is to live with??!!"...HAHAHA...My husband said he never forgot that conversation and since being married to me he now understands what my father was talking about...haha

Which gets me to the advice my father gave me.

My father was a man of few words. I remember standing by the washing machine/dryer apparently doing some laundry and he came up to me and gave me a hug and simply said one word...."Tolerance". I looked at him a bit puzzled and probably said something to him like "What's that suppose to mean?" and I only remember him saying something like "Just remember....tolerance".

I really had no clue what he was talking about at the time, but I sure figured it out through the many years I've been married. Cause when you think about it, it's really the LACK of tolerance that brings people to divorce. Nobody has any tolerance anymore when it comes to relationships. What you hear nowadays is "he does...blah, blah, blah....and I don't have to tolerate that!", or he/she does this or does that or doesn't do this or that and I DON'T HAVE TO TOLERATE THAT!" Well, guess what? YOU DO!...You do have to tolerate things in any relationship.

My husband will drive me up a wall sometimes, but I hear my father's voice and I simply tolerate it. And my poor husband has had to tolerate so much crap from me all these years. I'm surprised he hasn't divorced me, but he tolerates me I guess. When you look at couples who have been married 50/60 years it isn't because they are so much in love and have such a perfect happy marriage....no, it's cause they have tolerated crap and gotten through shit and ended up in a somewhat contented marriage with respect and love for each other. Cause you can't help but love a person who can tolerate your shit!

The problem with people today is that nobody thinks they have to tolerate anything anymore. They simply walk away from a relationship/marriage when things get too untolerable and they look for somebody else to fill their fantasy of a perfect marriage...and when they have to tolerate shit from them, then they are just so u-n-h-a-p-p-y that they can hardly stand it and why should they have to TOLERATE THAT!!?? Boo-hoo...Whatever...

Sometimes it's little annoying things you have to tolerate. Sometimes it's big things you have to tolerate. Sometimes you might even have to tolerate almost unforgiveable things. But that's life. People need to take their wedding vows more seriously.....For better or for worse means that you embrace the 'better' and tolerate the 'worse'.

Tolerance has saved my marriage many times over and we're still tolerating each other's crap...haha....but we got it together and that's the main thing. We'll grow older together and even now we look back on stuff and laugh. Cause all it takes is a little tolerance to get through things.