One-hundred sixty-five cups of black tea. That’s at least how many I’ve drunk since arriving Stateside last August. It’s how I start every morning here in New York. At home in the Dominican Republic, where leaf tea (Camellia sinensis)is uncommon, I make “tea” from fresh ginger root and cinnamon sticks, sweetened with the island’s own cream-colored sugar. I wish it had caffeine, but it’s still a good drink for starting the day.
One-hundred sixty-five cups of black tea, occasionally with a dollop of milk, never sweetened, equals 165 days separated from my husband. The separation was planned—I’d needed to update my passport, apply for my residence visa, catch up on monotonous paperwork, plus introduce our daughter to USA friends and family—but the duration was not. Even considering the pandemic it didn’t seem like everything would take more than 3 months. I had made two different extensive flow charts to guide me through the litany of legal processes (what do you know, my public health program planning classes actually prepared me for real life [also this gives you a hint at how complicated it is having a non-resident alien as a husband]) and 12 weeks seemed like a reasonable estimate.
Yet here we are.
I miss drinking ginger tea with my husband on weekend mornings. They are not leisurely mornings by any means (hello, Abigail, and all the work people who call my husband at home) but at least we are together, and at some point before noon we can agree that the tea was spicy and sweet and hit the spot.
Usually, I make the tea myself. However, there’s a woman from church who sells it on her street corner a few blocks away from my house. She has thermoses of tea, coffee, hot milk, and a container of homemade biscuits (“arepa”) set up on a plastic table beneath a red and white umbrella. A few times before I left for the USA, Victor surprised me and came home at 9am between jobs to steal me away from the house and grab tea and biscuits with me. We roared over on the motorcycle, made our purchase, then roared back. He had to return to work right afterward, but it was little moments like those snuck into busy days that we used to say goodbye.
Ginger tea is one of the few things Victor and I have in common. Yes, you read that right. The man with whom I am married to for forever is very different from me, and I from him.
He likes sweet, I like bitter. He likes one movie genre, I like another. We have different hobbies. I’m introverted, he’s extroverted. He likes rap, I like classical. He’s a night person, I’m a morning person. We have different tastes in fashion. I’m a planner, he’s spontaneous.
He thinks and operates generally like a Dominican, whereas I think and operate generally like an American. This means we have different ideals, different ways of interacting with people and navigating situations, and even different ways of interpreting life and the passage of time.
As you might guess, being opposites often makes us an unbeatable team. Where I’m weak, he’s strong, and vice versa.
As you might also guess, if we are not on our A-game, our differences create the perfect storm for conflict, or at the very least add a level of difficulty to every day that we have to navigate on top of everything else.
But, by the grace of God, we’re making it. And not just making it—we’re doing well. In our 3 short years of marriage we have learned so much about each other and how to act as one in everything from choosing what to have for breakfast to discussing how to raise kids. I’m confident that we’ll continue improving as time progresses, and that one day we’ll look back and laugh about how clueless we were about each other.
We will keep improving because we are not the ones in control of our relationship: Christ is. It doesn’t ultimately matter that my husband doesn’t think pizza is the best food in the world (I maintain it’s because he’s never had New York pizza). It doesn’t ultimately matter that we have different opinions on tattoos. It doesn’t ultimately matter that our perceptions of punctuality are different or that we have different levels of decorum.
All those things may induce stress in the moment, but we live and die over only one thing: Jesus. We are planted on the same bedrock and reaching up towards the same goal. Because of that, I can always kiss him goodnight, and we always stay friends.
I think marriage is potentially one of the hardest relationships on earth. You can move out of your parents’, drift away from your friend, and quit your boss, but biblically (barring a few exceptions) you can’t divorce your spouse.
So I guess my overriding point, besides talking about tea and reminiscing over good times with the husband I’m quite in love with and miss, is that if he and I can be in a healthy marriage with all of our super-extra-mega-ultra differences, Christians in general should be able to be friends with one another and encourage one another.
God has given us all the grace we need to be friends. Victor and I are in a healthy relationship precisely because we’ve grabbed onto that grace. As my pastor preached last Sunday, if relationships are failing, it’s because the parties involved have received the grace of God in vain. They are not using what is readily and easily available.
So Christian, let’s believe in the power of grace and step across the church pew, the picket fence, the voting booth, the color line, the frontier—whatever it is—and be friends, okay?
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