Relational tolls

Any relationship of any value or duration is like a road. Please excuse the somewhat unimaginative analogy.

You’ll run over potholes. There will be speed bumps and detours. The signs won’t always be clear. Sometimes you’ll wonder if you should have taken another route.

But where people mess up the most is when they set up – intentionally or not – relational tolls. In a good relationship, a toll is not part of the bargain. It serves instead to undermine the beauty of what could be. It is a fee that one party levies up on the other. Tolls are give-and-take, you versus me, and they are toxic.

Real relationships are one of the few areas of life that should require no economic upside for its participants. That is why good relationships are so treasured, and bad ones so damaging.

Personally, I’ve been collecting a toll from my wife for eight long years. The matter is too private to detail here, but the fee collection is done. I’m doing my part to start tearing down the collection booths that I’ve set up along our road called marriage.

I don’t have all of the answers and I can’t exactly see around our next turn. But I know that if my wife has to pay another relational toll, it won’t be one that I demand of her.