comparison

i have a confession to make: i've caused my relationship with my boyfriend to suffer lately because i keep comparing it to other people's relationships. you know the couple that just seems so perfect? he appears at her front door every single morning with starbucks and roses and drives her to work/school so that she can do her mascara in the car, allowing her to sleep in an extra 5 minutes in the morning. she is perfectly cute all the time and when he's sick she makes homemade chicken broth, all the while in a hand stitched apron that she made herself. just kidding and if you do these things.... seek therapy. 

but you know what i mean. you can't even imagine them fighting, they have the most loveable pictures together on facebook, they consistently do bible studies together every wednesday morning, etc, etc. you know who i'm talking about, right? 

well here's the deal... my boyfriend and i get in arguments. not all the time and not super regularly, but we still fight. most of our pictures together are of us making faces at the camera, we tried to do a bible study together but failed, and we endearingly call each other "bro." 

i love all this stuff about our relationship (except the failed bible study part of course) but sometimes i start looking around at all these couples who are just so insanely perfect and i start to question what he and i have. 

he reminded me today that i don't know what the people who i think are perfect are struggling with behind closed doors and that some people could even see us as being a perfect couple....and lawd knows we ain't.

anyway, thankfully i realized you can't compare what you have to someone else's. i definitely know that there are exceptions; there are abusive, toxic relationships out there in which cases it's good to realize that you need and deserve something better than what you have, but if you have a guy who loves God, makes you laugh, brings out the best in you, and likes you better in a ponytail than in heels, the grass is DEFINITELY the greenest on your side and, in this case, on my side. :) 

i'm going to let comparison stop robbing me of joy.