A wife confided that she had become very short with her husband over time and didn’t understand why. Upset by the tension she was feeling, she prayed for relief.

While listening spiritually, it occurred to her that she had been reading a number of romantic novels and had started to expect her husband to act like the suave, always tender and thoughtful guys in her books. The leading men of the stories always knew what their love wanted, when to give it to them, how to treat them just right, and how to say the right thing at the right time.

“Why shouldn’t my husband always be like these perfectly romantic guys?” she started to unconsciously argue.

But he wasn’t.

He didn’t always say the right thing. He didn’t always know what she was thinking. He didn’t always anticipate her every desire and want ahead of time. She was getting very bothered by this shortcoming on his part–at least in her eyes!

After substantial agony, she realized the men she read about in her novels were fairytale creatures. It was unfair to superimpose on her husband, who loved her very much and was faithful beyond reproach, the character of fantasy imagination.

She needed to simply love him for the wonderful person he was, she concluded, and no try to make him into something else.

The anger she had felt toward her husband evaporated. The edginess dissolved and it was easy to love him once again without qualification.

Mary Baker Eddy wisely wrote, over a hundred years ago,

“Novels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity, fill our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments.” Science and Health

We all can do a better job of living up to the ideal man of God’s creating. But we all have a lot to learn along the way too. The more we love the good that is obvious, and not get detoured by the strengths we have yet to master, the better we’ll all get along with each other, and stay a peaceful family in the meantime.