Forging Fortitude

Fortitude is the mental and spiritual strength to face and deal with obstacles--not only those that the world puts in your way, or that your loved ones create for you, but especially the obstacles that you create for yourself.

 

Also called "courage," fortitude is the virtue of strength in times of difficulty. Fortitude is doing the right thing, even if we have strong feelings of fear or anger holding us back. Fortitude sees to it that we do not succumb to the vice of cowardice--nor of its evil twin, excessive boldness.

 

In Dante’s Paradise, the sphere of Mars houses the courageous. Dante mostly encounters holy warriors, including the soul of his own great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, who was killed during the Second Crusade. He also encounters Biblical notables like Joshua and Judas Maccabeus, and mythic and historical figures like Roland and Charlemagne. This focus on martial courage is all very well but it obscures the ways in which the virtue of fortitude is a crucial everyday virtue that allows us to endure, and carry on, when things go badly.

​

There are three important ways fortitude plays a crucial role in your marriage:

• dealing with worldly woes,

• overcoming spouse-inflicted pain, and

• managing self-inflicted pain.
   

And there are three keys to fortitude in these situations:

• persistence,

• patience, and

• magnanimity.

​

Persistence is a form of self discipline that allows someone to continue doing something or trying to accomplish their goals in the face of difficulties, or opposition by other people.  Persistence involves keeping your eyes on your ultimate goals, sticking to your long-term plans and managing setbacks. 

​

Patience is the exercise of emotional self-control when life gets tough. It requires the ability to look outside of yourself, and to withhold judgment, to be slow to speak and act until you are sure you fully understand what you should say and do. But patience is not a passive virtue; it doesn’t just mean long suffering. Developing patience can involve learning to increase your focus on things that matter for your marriage and decreasing your focus on things that are less important. 

​

What these characteristics demonstrate is that fortitude requires a clear goal, or at least a vision, that one is able to focus on in order to endure hardship, and do the right thing in the face of obstacles.  “Keep your eyes on the prize,” was a famous slogan of Civil Rights activists, derived from a Gospel folk song about keeping one’s hand on the plow. 

​

Boldness without a goal is impulsive and imprudent, and often leads to escalating conflict, anger, and hurt feelings. In your marriage, the courage to stand up and fight is rarely virtuous; true fortitude usually lies in having the courage to take responsibility, having the endurance to suffer your spouse’s expressions of anger, hurt and pain without defensiveness, and having the patience and perseverance to work through their hurt to get the marriage back on track. True courage enables us to withstand many of the obstacles we experience in the world, as well as the obstacles we inflict on ourselves and our spouses.

 

Dealing with worldly woes

​

Perhaps the most obvious form of fortitude in marriage is our capacity to stand firm in the face of the obstacles that the world throws at us: economic downturns and the need to leave our homes and travel to new places and rebuild our lives; dealing with serious illness and pain; recovering from the violations of our car being stolen, our house vandalized or burgled; getting through the sense of loss brought on by the death of a child. In such cases, those in a healthy marriage often draw fortitude and courage from the marriage itself: “you and me against the world” is no empty phrase for a suffering couple. 

​

But what happens when your spouse is the one afflicted?

 

When author Paul West suffered a massive stroke, it left him unable to say anything more than a stuttering murmur. The author of dozens of books, both fiction and nonfiction, West had suffered immense damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form.

 

In her book One Hundred Names for Love Diane Ackerman describes how she struggled, against the assurances of doctors that it was useless, to teach her husband to use language all over again. Ackerman’s technique was at once intensive and playful. Ackerman created word games and word puzzles and encouraged her husband to coin new nicknames for her— 100 of them, ranging from cute to ridiculous. Gradually, as they played, both worked through their frustrations with the difficult situation, even as Paul’s language abilities began to gradually improve.

​

We can learn important things from Ackerman’s effort. Ackerman watched and worked with a series of speech therapists only to realize that their approaches to healing often left her husband exhausted and demoralized--sometimes because he would produce words like “tesseract” which they thought were nonsense words. Ackerman conducted research but, more importantly, carefully observed her husbands’ successes and made her own plan to build on these.

​

Ackerman is not a religious woman in the conventional sense of the term (she once said that writing is her form of prayer). But she exhibited the attentive patience that is one of the keys to fortitude. She played with her husband, she observed and wrote about his changing condition, and she meditated deeply on it, using those meditations to adjust and change her play, and her plans, as she worked through her vocation.

​

And Ackerman acted with magnanimity, with greatness of mind and heart and spirit, recognizing that she had done nothing wrong but was still willing to play the cards fate had dealt her and her spouse rather than walk away. She expressed this magnanimity through play, making a game to heal the affliction.

​

Self-inflicted pain

​

Sometimes one member of a couple is overwhelmed by elements that strike to the heart of their sense of self, and in dealing with their internal pain, grief or loneliness, they shut themselves off from their spouse. Miscarriage, impotence, the death of a loved one or some other sudden catastrophic event may affect one spouse much more than the other and create a burden that undermines their coupleship.

 

It takes great fortitude to shoulder one’s burdens and obligations within the marriage when you are suffering from pain, loneliness, grief, or hurt. 

​

“This can’t go on,” Louise told Wes at their State of our Union. “I know you feel betrayed, and frustrated, and angry with what’s happened to your career, and I share those feelings. But you are bringing that anger and frustration into our marriage and shutting me out. I feel lonely and abandoned. It hurts that you aren’t here for me and you won’t let me be here for you.” 

​

Life had done a number on Wes. After a decade of rising through the ranks of his company and being made head of engineering, Wes was sent by the management to law school to prepare him for a new management position that required a thorough knowledge of both engineering and law. But in his final semester, his company was bought by another company with a different vision. The new position was eliminated and Wes found himself without a job.

 

Wes felt betrayed; he was devastated and depressed. For several weeks he obsessively called colleagues and e-mailed resumes in pursuit of a job, but the years he’d spent in management and studying law had put him out of touch with his engineering specialities, and he could find no positions commensurate with his odd combination of degrees or the salaries he’d previously had. He was either overqualified or underqualified. He felt like a failure.

​

After three weeks, his wife told him at their State of our Union meeting that while she sympathized with his anger and depression over his job loss, she was feeling abandoned in their marriage. She felt he’d withdrawn into himself, and when he had any time for her at all, she heard only repetitious tales of his woes. Wes assured her it was temporary, just until he found a new job. 

​

Three months later, there was still no job, and their marriage was still on hold. Wes was depressed. Flooded with shame, humiliation, and anxiety, he continued to disengage from his marriage. He and Louise didn’t fight, but they also didn’t talk much. He ignored his household obligations until reminded, then silently took care of them. He spent hours in front of the television or on the computer trying to distract himself from his anxieties.

​

He received a wake up call when his wife asked him if he wanted a separation.

 

“You’ve already separated from me emotionally,” she told him. “This might make it easier on both of us until you get over this slump.”

 

Instead of a separation, Wes took a hiatus from his job hunt. He took over all the household and yard chores, cooked their meals and maintained their cars. As he worked, he prayed and meditated. After six months he went back on the job hunt but this time seeking part-time work. He found a part-time job helping manage web sites making a small salary supplemented by commissions. Eventually the job went full time, but he was able to work from home and continue covering most of the house and yard work. 

​

Once he realized how badly he was hurting himself and, as a result, his marriage, Wes exhibited all the aspects of fortitude. Instead of becoming hurt and angry with his wife, he stepped out of his own hurt to see what the marriage looked like from her point of view. Wes abandoned his efforts to hold on to his career goals and salary requirements. He took over the household chores not only to demonstrate his commitment to his wife but to keep himself productive while he patiently developed a new life plan in which he was no longer the primary breadwinner. Instead, he made a new plan based on the principle that the purpose of his work was to earn enough to support his vocation: being a good husband. 

​

Overcoming spouse-inflicted pain

 

Living with someone, even someone with whom you are in love, is never easy. As the early haze of romance wears off, irritating habits and different approaches to day-to-day life can turn into continuous day to day aggravations. The work of continually bearing these, coming to an accommodation with them and even growing to appreciate them as aspects of your spouse's personality requires fortitude.

​

Ken likes a neat house like the one he grew up in. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” was his mother’s motto for the two-bedroom apartment in which he grew up. Monique grew up kicking off her shoes and dumping her stuff on the dining room table as she came into her house. Her family’s house accumulated detritus all week until Saturday, when her parents cranked up the music and the entire family pitched in to clean the house top to bottom.

 

Monique likes a neat house, but doesn’t see the water bottle left on the coffee table or her laptop plugged in on the living room chair all day as a big deal. Fortitude involves Ken putting up with these small, continuing infringements on his expressed preferences. Fortitude involves Monique putting up with Ken’s occasional outbursts or nagging when the clutter gets out of hand.

​

There is nothing petty about such daily accommodations. It requires a genuine magnanimity of spirit, patience, and an ability to focus on the larger picture, to make a plan that focuses on what you should put up with and what you must ask your spouse to change. Asking your spouse to change, and pursuing that patiently and kindly, also requires fortitude.

​

“Committing oneself exclusively and definitively to another person always involves a risk and a bold gamble,” writes Pope Francis. Fortitude is about having the courage to take that risk, and make that gamble, in a hundred small ways every day. 

​

Over the Christmas holidays Mack and Doha took their adult children to an AirBnb in Gatlinburg, TN. Every year one of the Christmas treats Mack looked forward to most eagerly was homemade caramel from a family recipe that Doha had inherited from her mother. Her gifting him with caramel--which required a long period of standing at the stove stirring boiling liquid, and constant attention to consistency--dated back to the earliest years of their coupleship.

 

This year, each day of the holiday was filled with family activities busy preparations for Christmas and when Christmas dawned, Doha still hadn’t made the caramel.  Mack was hurt that Doha had not made the caramel. It was a sign to him that in all the planning and organizing to make a vacation for herself and the children, he’d gotten lost in the shuffle.

 

To make the best of a bad deal, he announced to her, “If you aren’t going to make caramel, I’m going to use your sugar and corn syrup to make caramel corn.” Doha was taken aback and hurt. She had planned to make caramel, and brought all the ingredients. Although she didn’t feel she’d had time to make the caramel yet, they still had two days of vacation. Mack’s announcement that he was going to repurpose her supplies and make an alternative Christmas treat was uncalled for and unwarranted--and more than a little arrogant, in her opinion.

​

Doha firmly but kindly told Mack that he wasn’t allowed to use her supplies nor use ultimatums to get what he desired. She told him to go and think about another way to politely request what he wanted. 

​

The example here is not simply showing us Doha’s courage in standing up to her husband. It is also about Mack’s failure to speak out. Mack may well have justified his assertion that he’d make caramel corn as trying to resolve his hurt feelings in a positive way, by taking action, but it was not a courageous act.

 

Mack should have started with magnanimity and considered Doha’s position. He should have made a plan--which as a first step would have required him to frame a goal. Was the objective merely to produce a Christmas treat? How would that resolve his feelings of being ignored or slighted? If he’d thought it through he would have realized that the only way to actually address those feelings would be to ask for what he wanted. That he chose not to do so demonstrates fear: the everyday fear of taking the risk of rejection. 

​

Must we create a confrontation every time our feelings are hurt?  Of course not. Often we can, like Ken and Monique, shake it off. But if we are going to say something, as Mack did, we owe it to our spouse and our marriage—and to justice--to have the courage to ask in spite of the risk.

​

Ultimately, fortitude is about building the courage to, on the one hand, dare to ask, and on the other hand, to risk saying “yes.” Ultimately, the virtue of courage is about overcoming fear.

 

There is a lot to fear in the marital call to intimacy. Humility, subjugation to the greater needs of spouse and family, self-giving generosity, service--all these can create real fear because we must become vulnerable and expose ourselves, even risk the loss of some of our selfhood. Fortitude enables us to moderate the emotions of fear and risk and brings them into balance with our reason.

 

A truly brave soul does not suppress fear but experiences it, rides it out, and moderates it. By enduring fear and choosing the “high road” of moral action, we become what we choose, whether that be spouse, lover, caregiver, or friend. Our character is formed through the choices we make and the behaviors we perform.

​

Will I tell the truth to my spouse, even when I have failed to live up to our agreements? Truth is a crucible in marriage. Accepting responsibility for our errors requires the fortitude to face our partner’s reaction. 

​

Will I choose my pride over honesty? Will I lie and become untrustworthy? If I choose deficiently, I become deficient. In making an unjust choice, I become unjust. I have chosen my good over the common good.

​

“Life as a couple is a daily sharing in God’s creative work, and each person is for the other a constant challenge from the Holy Spirit” writes Pope Francis. For Francis, the challenges posed by living with our spouse are part of our potential for creativity, and for growth--if we can overcome our fears. 

​

Discernment

 

How is your fortitude? As the stories in this chapter suggest, one of the best ways to decide is to review your behavior during a recent altercation with your spouse.

​

Am I impatient? If you are quick to express anger, or get defensive easily, or you flee from tense or negative interactions rather than work through them, you may need to work on your courage.

​

Am I focused on the right goals? Like Mack in the anecdote above, sometimes we move too quickly to solutions, or respond emotionally rather than reasonably. When that happens, our solutions usually only solve some surface issues and don’t deal with the underlying relationship issues. 

​

Am I trying to be right or in a relationship? If it is more important to you to defend yourself, or to explain or excuse actions that bother your spouse, than it is to listen to their feelings and concerns (which may, admittedly, be painful or discouraging), you may need to work on your fortitude.

​

Am I a doormat? Have I developed a disposition toward timidity and fearfulness that guides my actions (or lack thereof) when situations arise in which I should speak out for and/or perform what I know is right and just. If you have overshot the golden mean of patience by an undue subservience, accepting unjust behavior or too readily silencing yourself rather than sharing your concerns and feelings, you may be deficient in the virtue of courage. 

 

Am I resigned? In our chapter on Justice, we stressed the importance of defining and addressing the important things that spouses must come to accept about each other. Many other things must just be accepted  as aspects of your spouses behavior you can live with. Fortitude involves living with these patiently and even cheerfully, not with a sad or defeated sense of resignation.

​

Am I self-martyring?  Fortitude is the virtue of working through obstacles with a good will, If you find yourself  complaining of the pains you  must endure to all who will hear you, you are probably deficient in fortitude.

 

Am I stingy? If you are not displaying magnanimity and contributing generously to the needs of your marriage and family but are giving your time and resources grudgingly, or only after making sure your own desires are met, you may need to work on courage.

​

Practical Advice:

 

To develop courage you have to start developing courage as you do any other muscle. You have to start with small things and build it up.

 -- Maya Angelou

​

From dealing with worldly slings and arrows to disappointment and depression to asking for what you want and confessing your feelings, fortitude is about dealing with threatening situations, and we actually know a great deal about how what is needed when faced with a threatening situation.

​

Determine your  Goal.  Whether it is helping your spouse through an illness, rethinking your career/family life balance, or seeking greater intimacy, you need to have a clear sense of the goal you are seeking to achieve if you can overcome the obstacles. Your goal should be specific and clear, so that you can be clear when you have accomplished it. The goal should be realistic and attainable, and you should have a sense of when it should be achieved.

​

Make a Plan. Once you have a goal, you can make a plan to accomplish it. Working backward from your goal, you need to work out the steps you must take to get there. Perhaps your plan will stretch out across months; perhaps it will require only a few minutes. The plan should be flexible, too—if something goes wrong, you need tobe able to quickly reorganize.
 

Pray. Whether it takes the form of a petition (“Lord, give me strength”), a conversation with God, or a deeply focused awareness on your feelings, thoughts, and sensations, prayer can be a crucial tool in locating your fears and working through them.
 

Practice Delayed Gratification. Delayed gratification doesn’t just mean patience; it involves keeping your eyes on your goal, sticking to your plan and managing setbacks. Developing the characteristic of delayed gratification can involve learning to increase your focus on things that matter for your marriage and decreasing your focus on things that are less important. In the moment, staying mindful of the things that make you impatient, and relaxing and taking deep breaths when you experience those things, can be useful. In the longer term, the best way to become more patient about reaching goals is to make yourself wait. Starting with small things like waiting a few extra minutes to give yourself a treat, or letting someone pull in front of you in the midst of a traffic slowdown, and gradually moving on bigger and bigger efforts. Another exercise is to play turn taking games like chess, backgammon and card games. Don’t get on your phone while waiting for your turn. Stay in the moment. Focus on conversing with your fellow players.

 

Practice Magnanimity. St. Ignatius argued in his Spiritual Exercises that “magnanimity” was the essential virtue for practicing the fortitude he expected of members of his new Jesuit order. They could bear much hardship, and endure much suffering because their eyes were on the big picture. The word itself means “great souled” or noble of spirit, because magnanimous people hold themselves above small slights, gossip, the meager pleasures of flattery and minor irritations, choosing instead to focus on the important things, including especially their vocation. As a result, they are generous, quick to forgive, and quick to offer help, but reluctant to ask for favors. A magnanimous slogan for your marriage might be: “Ask not what your spouse can do for you, but what you can do for your spouse.”