Marriage and Tennis

Marriage is like a game of tennis. Two players. Constant interaction. You’re every move depends completely on your partner’s actions. Unfortunately, we all come to the game of tennis with some very different expectations.

We all grow up watching tennis be played, and not necessarily in your own home, but we learn the rules by years of observation. However, what you may have been observing was underwater basket weaving and what your spouse was watching was field hockey and now you have come together to play actual, real tennis. And while you obviously cannot play tennis without your scuba tank, you still don’t understand why your spouse continues to pick up a hockey stick.

So you both come to the court ready to play tennis but your versions of the game are so vastly different and you experience great conflict. So how do you play together? Successfully, you can’t. You must both completely deconstruct your versions of “tennis,” and find the one true version. You must find the real rule book, and agree that it is the real rule book, and you must throw out every idea of how you’ve played tennis from the past and learn anew how to get the ball over the net – without your scuba tank, and without the hockey stick, even though you’ve become so accustomed to it over the years, and this new game seems so uncomfortable and foreign.

You realize you’re not as good at real tennis as you thought you were, and some of your best moves from your old “tennis” games are actually completely illegal in real tennis. It requires different muscles than underwater basket weaving did, and it requires a certain restraint that field hockey never did. But wow, when you get the ball volleying back and forth smoothly, it is more satisfying than you could have ever imagined. And the more you practice, the easier the backhand stroke becomes, and you find you can even return the wild ones with grace because you’ve gotten stronger and better.

It is a discipline.

Some people grow up with closer to accurate versions of real tennis than others, but the nature of the beast is that none of us have ever played correctly, ever. But we all can get better. And it is so much more enjoyable when we do.