Uninvited Guests

It may come as a surprise to the just-married when they find that they are not alone in their new home. Those who are contemplating marriage (or re-marriage) would do well to recognize that it's likely someone is going to be sharing their living space, at least for awhile. These uninvited personalities make their presence felt at the most inappropriate times—during otherwise pleasant dinner-table conversation, while sharing ordinary household tasks, even in the tenderest intimacies of the bedroom.

Nor is it only in marriage that we find these interlopers. They hound us at work, they follow us into the grocery store, they may even attend church when we do. There is no place where we are safe from the uncomfortable or downright disturbing presence of these uninvited guests.

Well, who are these rude folks? They are not, as one might suppose, his children or hers from an earlier relationship nor an aging or ill parent who must have care. Those situations are certainly not easy, but one can cope with them by making some house rules, putting locks on doors, or creating some trade-offs. These intruders are not private investigators sent to your workplace, spies secretly checking out your marketing habits, or evil entities of some sort trying to distract you from worship. As a matter of fact, they are not even real people. They are but shadows of real people—perhaps the authority figures of your childhood, or your partner in a former marriage, somebody you knew long ago and couldn't trust, or even the fantasy, larger-than-life figure of yourself as the perfect mate or the ideal employee.

These intruders are difficult to deal with, being, as they are, so sly and elusive. It is not necessary for them to batter their way in for they come through closed doors anyway, floating unbidden into the situations of ordinary life. They do not ask permission to enter the present; they just arrive and wait to be accepted.

And therein is the key. It is our recognition—over and over again, if it takes that—that makes them slink away. When your husband gets surly because you've repeated your request to take care of some chore, he very possibly is not responding to you, but to his mother or his fifth grade teacher, or to some other person you don't even know and who he himself doesn't realize has come back. When the boss seems gruff, you may react as though you were being scolded by a parent or coach or some former authority with whom you had a run-in. And keep in mind, he or she may be acting out of some past scenario as well. It gets complicated!

There are usually enough difficult people in the world around us that we hardly need to accept the uninvited ones from the past! The better we are able to recognize these shadowy persons for who they are, the better we can make appropriate responses to the real people in our lives.

Marjorie