Create The Queen

You stood at the altar, utterly convinced.

Your friends had warned you: told you that you were about to exchange your bachelor freedom for sleepless nights, dirty diapers, and the ceaseless braying of children.

You saw the burdens of family life before you, and you felt happy–even eager–to shoulder the harness.

For this woman in white before you… this beautiful, adoring bride… she fired you as no one ever had before.

With HER by your side… with her love, adoration and BELIEF shoring you up, what could you NOT do? What burdens could you NOT withstand?

Her love had created a stage on which all that was good and strong and noble in you played out effortlessly… and you married her in part to go on feeling this fire her love lit within you.

But then, as the blunt force trauma of parenthood fell full upon you, grinding on for weeks, months, years… you felt a troubling ebb.

This well-spring of inspiration, this queen-inspired fire… it began to fade.

The cooling continued, faster and faster, until at last you looked to your wife with anger: where were the tears of love and adoration and belief she once gave you? Where was that lifeblood you had counted on?

But the problem is not with your woman.

It is with your belief that your inspiration and action is somehow her responsibility.

When you place the burden of your inspiration on your wife, you give her a power she is neither willing nor fit to wield.

You should never have made her the keeper of your flame.

You should never have expected the queen to make the king.

So stop expecting your wife to inspire you.

Stop looking for outside coronation.

Be the king who creates the queen.

Gaze into her eyes.

Listen when she speaks, with both ears, and with both eyes.

Kiss deeper, hold longer.

Lavish gifts, jewels, clothing, words of affection.

Create a current of love and vision and reckless giving that sweeps her up and carries her along, rapt.

Whether or not she returns that love does not matter.

It is the act of loving her that fires you, not its reciprocation.

Any love or adoration she returns is immaterial: the essential magic has already happened inside you. The fire has already been lit.

“Why would I kiss that mouth?” you say. “Why would I gaze into those cold, bitter eyes? How could I treat as queen this woman who sneers and scorns so unbearably?”

And that, there, is the double-bind that has been holding your marriage, your very kingship, captive:

This love, this respect, this adoration you long for her to give you… it is not hers to give but for YOU TO CREATE in her.

Mold her into her best, highest self. Not with silence or criticism or ultimatums, but with acts of imagination and love.

No matter how deep your disillusionment, it is the only way: you must create the queen.

For one holy day, suspend your grief and despair and anger and LOVE HER as though today is the last day of her life.

Only then will you have the queen you’ve been longing for.

Only then will you know the old heat.

Do not look to her:

It is YOU who must relight the forges.

It is YOU who must finally decide he is king.