On Dandelions
And Why You Should Never Trust the Internet With Your Marriage
On a scorched and barren landscape, dandelions are the first plants to take root. They aerate the soil making it possible for other plants to thrive. When they’re pulled from the earth they worked so hard to till- they provide nutrients to beast and human alike who eat them.
I watched a reel on marriage this week.
In 30 seconds, I was bombarded with messages that made my stomach clench with a familiar uneasiness I often experience when someone attempts to glamorize marriage “restoration” on the internet.
Text flashed across the screen about how “so many thought they wouldn’t make it.” How the world, “views divorce as the only option to conflict”. How they worked steadfastly to “pull out the weeds” in their marriage and water the flowers instead.
The pictures of their lives over the years were hued rosy and blurry at the edges- like they had gradually, like a movie, forgotten what it is like to wake up and chose the same person; literally every day.
But, you can’t direct the raindrops.
They fall on weeds and flowers alike.
And what happens to the soil when the dandelions are gone, pulled from the root?
What could possibly grow there anymore?
The weeds have been the very thing that kept us alive.
It has taken me close to seven years to feel a deeply rooted gratitude for the weeds I had once blamed for the uprooting of my marriage.
Yes. My gratitude is FOR the WEEDS.
To feel the soil beneath my bare feet and know that though it was barren and burned, there was something just beneath the surface breaking up rock and clay. It was me.
I am not who I was. We are not who we were.
I wish the process hadn’t been so gutting. But we don’t get to choose, do we? Not what we face- just how we face it. And we have faced it angrily, brokenly, and then- with awe and reverence. We have crawled through fire. We are scarred forever. We are not the same; separately, or together. And I am deeply grateful because I am me in a way I have never been me before. And we love in a way we never have been able to before.
Because of the weeds.
There have also been plenty of times I had thought that walking away was the bravest, smartest option. For me, and for others. One does not cancel out the other.
It feels unnecessarily precarious to teeter on the edge of honoring and celebrating:
1. Those who chose to stay in marriage ( if that’s what they want).
2. Those who chose to go (if that’s what they want).
Because the truth is, the world has never been kind to women, no matter their choice.
Whether they stay, or whether they go.
Sometimes that unkindness is loud; I prefer that, in truth. At least I know what I’m dealing with. But often the unkindness comes in pastel filters and flowing tulle and clipped cliches of how things are, “all better now because of x, y, and z”. Highlight reels with flower petals and trending song clips after deception or infidelity or abuse or neglect or loneliness or sadness or unfulfilled longing or non-commitment is an insult at best; mocking cruelty at worst, for those bloody and trembling from their own aftermath, still trying to navigate a way forward and through with themselves in tact.
We don’t live in squares or to soundtracks. Dangling perfection after apocalypse on a reel feels too much like Tantalus standing in lapping water, and dying of thirst.
The simple, basic truth is this: You can’t only water the flowers. The rain will always fall on the weeds. To suggest otherwise refutes the laws of nature and common sense.
If you are already getting marital advice from Instagram, you’re beyond any help I can offer you in a newsletter.
What I WILL say is this:
You are not your marriage.
A GOOD marriage can’t be defined by anyone other than the people who are in it.
There is no formula, structure, or pattern to follow that will secure goodness. Humans just aren’t that predictable. Love and commitment are a crapshoot; to quote the Dread Pirate Roberts, “…anyone who says otherwise is selling something.”
There has never been a guarantee; but I think, deep down, you already knew that. There are only human people, attempting to love- and then attempting again. And again. First themselves- and then, each other. For me, it has been more than worth it. But that choice is my own, and it never came with a flowing pink dress or a perfectly executed denouement. I haven’t curated my trauma or my projected wholeness to fit an algorithm- the space isn’t wide or deep enough.
The dandelions return every year, in spring. Even if we thought we had pulled out each and every one. We could choose to ball up our fists at our fuzzy yard or pluck a few, sunny- yellow faces for the kitchen window to remember- we are here because of the weeds.
We are here in this place because of the weeds.