Be Very Tolerant and Patient of One Another

Relationships are hard--there’s no doubt about it. But despite their difficulties we all seem to cling to companionship. Maybe it’s our innate ability to fall in love. One of the harder parts of being a couple is the loss of freedom. I don’t just mean the freedom of running off to travel with friends, or staying out at a bar too late. I mean the freedom of being the quirky individuals we all are. Every one of us has these little things we do, which our significant other may have found cute at one point, but eventually can be really annoying to anyone other than ourselves. And, it’s during these times that David’s and Elisheva’s advice comes into play. The person we’ve chosen to spend the rest of our lives with is not a carbon copy of us. They think differently, react differently, and feel differently about things than we do. And the longer you’re with someone sometimes the more frustrating it can be when they don’t do something the exact same way that we do it. It’s a ridiculous expectation when you think about it, but when you’re in a relationship it tends to be one of those things you seem to keep arguing about. “I just don’t understand how you could (fill in the blank).”

When I first interviewed David, he asked me to film him separately from Elisheva. He’s a religious Jew, and therefore didn’t want to publicize the fact that he was “living in sin.” He joked about it, as he seems to do often, but he was clearly serious as he made sure that Elisheva was standing outside of frame. And then, while speaking to David on camera, he refers to Elisheva; she leans into frame and they throw their arms around each other. You can’t tolerate another person being different from you until you are comfortable with yourself. And it was as if David decided in that moment that he no longer cared what other people thought. He’s in love.

*Elisheva says, "it was a shidduch," when asked how they met. A shidduch is an arranged date for the purpose of marriage (common in ultra-Orthodox Judaism).