He's right? Right!

Rox and I were talking the other day, as we often do, about the state of our unions. For us, that often means comparing notes about the unbelievability of the things husbands do.

They're different, she said. Of course they're different; we can see that dangling. But she meant that Modern Husbands are really, especially different. And they are more different from us than husbands used to be from their wives.

Think about it. This is the first generation where we are regularly connecting with people who are from other backgrounds, other classes, other races. Back in the day, people stayed close to home and married their high-school sweetheart. If they moved, they moved to places where there were other people from back home. (Thus the migration trends that led to the Up South phenomenon—where groups of people from, say, Georgia all landed in the same blocks in New York.) In my parents' day, you were taking your life and liberty into your hands to marry outside of your race. People kept to their own kind and their own class. (Some Black folks even tried to stick with people their own shade of brown.)

All that seems as outdated as a chocolate malted now, but it created an atmosphere in which people started off in marriage with a common foundation. These days we don't have those common roots for our unions. And this cultural chaos gets piled on to the fact of the Mars-Venus madness that ensues when you marry someone of the opposite gender—someone who, according to some scientific research, has a brain that just plain works a different way. Then swirl in the fact that gender roles have morphed, so there is no June and Ward Cleaver standard that we all know to live by. And top it off with the cherry that is our ego: We want to be right. We think we ARE right.

It is a huge, sweet, beautiful, tragic mess.

And then Rox dropped the real shocker: They are different and...sit down for this...they have every right to be. The challenge comes when you begin to think that the fact that he doesn't think like you think means he's just...wrong.

We are raised in certain environments with certain values and certain experiences that form who we are and how we live. It is all too real to us. And it’s all too right. And if the opposite of right is wrong, and if what he thinks seems to oppose what to we think, therefore he is wrong.

Right?

Maybe. Maybe not. He has a right to the opinions borne of his experiences. He has a right to do things in his own way, in his own time. He has a right to believe what has grown in his heart. I don’t have the right to tell him that his understanding, his beliefs, his ways are wrong. He is right. (Unless he is, in fact, wrong.)

AND.... And his rights and his rightness do not mean that I am wrong. I have the right to my own experiences and views and ways, as well.

So there it is. Simple as that. Right?