A couple weeks ago I was preparing my visiting teaching lesson and came across this article in the Ensign again. I remember reading it when I was single, (it was originally published in April 1993, but is a favorite so they have re-publihed it) so it didn't have much meaning since I didn't have a husband yet! Now that I do, I can apply it to my own marriage and I think it's the cutest story. I love it. So I read it to Dane for our FHE lesson and expressed to him how much I love every little thing about him. Now days, if I make a small complaint he says, "Grapefruit Syndrome, babe." It's a fun little reminder that the "taste of marriage" can always be a little sweeter.
{"As a young wife, I learned that the taste
of marriage could be sweeter if I
didn't focus on my husband's faults...}
My husband and I had been married about two years--just long enough for me to
realize that he was normal rather than a knight on a whit charger--when I read a magazine article recommending that married couples schedule regular talks to discuss, truthfully and candidly, the habits or mannerisms they find annoying in
each other. The theory was that if the partners knew of such annoyances, they
could correct them before resentful feelings developed.
It made sense to me. I talked with my husband about the idea. After some hesitation, he agreed to give it a try.
As I recall, we were to name five things we found annoying, and I started off. After more than 50 years, I remember only my first complaint: grapefruit. I told him that I didn't like the way he ate grapefruit. He peeled it and ate it like an orange! Nobody else I knew ate grapefruit like that. Could a girl be expected to spend a lifetime, and even eternity, watching her husband eat grapefruit like an orange? Although I have forgotten them, I'm sure the rest of my complaints were similar.
After I finished, it was his turn to tell the things he disliked about me. Though it has been more than half a century, I still carry a mental image of my husband's handsome young face as he gathered his brows together in a thoughtful, puzzled frown and then looked at me with his large blue-gray eyes and said, "Well, to tell the truth, I can't think of anything I don't like about you, Honey."
Gasp.
I quickly turned my back, because I didn't know how to explain the tears that had filled my eyes and were running down my face. I had found fault with him over such trivial things as the way he ate grapefruit, while he hadn't even noticed any of my peculiar, and no doubt annoying, ways.
I wish I could say that this experience completely cured my of fault finding. It didn't. But it did make me aware early in my marriage that husbands and wives need to keep in perspective, and usually ignore, the small difference in their habits and personalities. Whenever I hear of married couples being incompatible, I always wonder if they are suffering from what I now call the Grapefruit Syndrome.
By: Lola B. Walters
