Barb Caffrey's Blog

The last few weeks, I’ve been thinking a great deal about how your perspective can change how you look at things.

You may be asking yourself why, though. (Lucky you; I’m about to tell you.) Why now, in particular? And why at this time in my personal history, much less American and world history, rather than some other time?

Some of why I’m thinking about this now is because I realized I now have the baseline for a lengthy look at what I’ve done, what I’ve not done, and what I still want to do. (Clear as mud, right?) I can look back at my twenty-one-year-old self, and see how my idealism blinded me when it came to choosing my first husband. I can also see how my loyalty to him became somewhat of a trap, though it wasn’t intentional…basically, I believed that anyone I picked would have the same beliefs, values, and ethics as myself.

Ha!

Of course, I was very young then. I didn’t understand what a good relationship, much less a marriage, was supposed to be about. As I’ve said many times here at my blog, a good marriage contains trust, shared sacrifice, at least some of the same values, and a willingness to learn from your partner as well as from your own actions and inactions.

See, you have to choose every single day to be in your relationship, if you want it to be any good. And your partner must choose it as well; if you choose it, but your partner doesn’t, that’s the recipe for divorce right there.

But just choosing to be where you are with a proper partner (such as my late husband Michael) is not enough. You have to be willing to communicate in good times and bad; you have to put yourself out there and be vulnerable, because that’s the only way you can forge a lasting bond between you. You also have to be honest with yourself as to what you want and what you don’t; you have to know yourself, preferably well enough that you don’t put yourself behind the eight ball due to picking a partner who’s totally unsuited for you (as I did with my first ex-husband).

Mind you, just because someone’s wrong for you as a spouse, that doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. Michael was also divorced, and he was friends until the end of his life with his ex-wife. In fact, I still talk to her from time to time and consider her a friend, so I know it’s possible to pick someone you really care about, but who just isn’t right for you as a marital partner.

In Michael and my case, we learned from our failed marriages. We were able to build a very successful marriage — though brief in chronological time, mind you, as we had less than three years together all told — because we were everything we said we were, and we wanted to grow together and become wiser and kinder people. We also were able to flower creatively — this sounds so weird, doesn’t it? — and created different stories than we might’ve, had we not found each other, and had we not married.

All I know is this: If you want a good, solid, lasting marriage (or long-term partner, for those who won’t marry under any circumstances but still want a long-term bond), you have to be willing to show who you are to your partner/spouse. You can’t be afraid of your warts, in other words; you have to be willing to face them.

There is a silver lining to being able to gain perspective, you see, and it’s this: Our greatest gifts are also our greatest weaknesses, but our greatest weaknesses are our greatest strengths.

Why is this? I’m not sure. Paradoxically, perhaps, we humans have the ability to draw strength from tragedy and be able to turn it — sometimes, anyway — into an opportunity we’d otherwise not have had.

So, that’s why I’m considering perspective this morning at oh-dark-thirty. It’s worth a thought, or two, or twenty, because the more you learn about yourself and other people, the better you can treat others (and, hopefully, also yourself). You need perspective to see this, and to recognize that while none of us are perfect, we can still rejoice in the fact that we are human with all the strengths and weaknesses being ourselves brings.

And, as a writer, knowing this about perspective helps to illuminate my stories just a tad bit extra so they can feel real. That feeling of verisimilitude aids in staying in the reader’s trance, after all!

Anyway, thinking about perspective as it comes to you and others you’ve known is not just an exercise in navel-gazing (though my introspection may make it seem so). It’s another tool in the writer’s tool kit, and as such, it can be quite valuable if used correctly.