Are You the Garden or the Gardener?

Recently I heard someone make a comment that “In any good relationship, one partner is the gardener and the other is the garden; to grow successfully, we take turns in each role.”

At first I thought this was a little silly, but the more I thought about it the more sense it made. I can relate to the lyrics in the song Unbroken Ground by Gary Nichols. Growing up as a farm kid, this one really hit home; being in love with someone that has a few weeds that seem to match my weeds… well, that makes the song a hit, for me,  right away.

It has become clearer to me that problems in our relationships occur when we feel that we always have to fill the role of the gardener on a continual basis. We always have to be the strong one, have the answers and keep it all together and wrapped in a neat little package. Likewise, if you are with someone who always wants to be the garden, a relationship never grows or blossoms; so a good harvest always falls short. After all, a gardener only has so many hours of daylight and so much energy.

What I’m coming to the realization of is that the person that I feel is my soul mate, the person that I love more than anything; we are so much alike that we tend to do more damage than good.  We both are an alpha type, and always try to fill the role of the gardener. We don’t do well at being the garden. I don’t think that either of us had the opportunity to be the garden growing up or in previous relationships, so we don’t know how.  We’d rather fill the role of the strong gardener than to feel like the needy one. More than anything, we don’t want to admit that we can’t handle everything and anything, because in a strange way, it feels as if we are letting them and everyone else around us down.

I can’t speak for him, I have my guess, but he never would admit that I was anywhere close in thinking to his, so I’m probably wrong. So, for me, I always felt like he fell in love originally with the person who was strong, didn’t let anything get to them or bring them down (which I could be completely misguided on). I felt like I was wrong to say, “Hey, I’m hurting right now, I need help, I need a hand, or I’m not okay.” So, we had a relationship where communicating what the root problems were, was non-existent. The truth is he and I had very few problems that really belonged to us as a couple; they were weeds that blew in from neighboring gardens and because we couldn’t stop being the gardener, the weeds took over completely.

The irony in this is that for as much as I wanted to be the garden sometimes, I felt it wasn’t my place. A year ago in April, I finally knew that I couldn’t take it anymore and I was about to fall; I had a crazy pain in the a$$ who hooked up with my neighbor and tried to cause some problems for me at home. Instead of allowing me to be hurt, angry, frustrated at the situation, I was just supposed to go back to measuring to start another project, like it didn’t happen. The truth is, at that particular moment, I needed him to hold me, not expect me to work, hold me and tell me it would be okay and we would figure it out. But he didn’t, he became upset with me for being angry and he walked out, we haven’t been a couple since.

Maybe it’s situations like this that define us and tell us the next time to never allow yourself to become the garden, because when you do, the loss may be more than you expect.