I have thought long and hard about how personal I really want to be in this space considering that I am no longer anonymous. I am fortunate that for the most part the thoughts and opinions expressed in this space don’t bother my employer. That said, since I may not always be with this employer, I am starting to think more about what I actually share, especially after one of my closest friends shared with me that during a recent credit and background check for an apartment her now landlord pulled up her twitter account. Yikes!
Yet I am an open and honest person and so I figure if you know me offline eventually you will know who I am. That said, something I read earlier really bugged me, like really pissed me off especially as I am dealing with some pretty deep shit. The words of wisdom that set me off came from an unmarried woman, a good decade younger than me that shared that the key to staying married is simply to never get a divorce…ever! If only it were simple, but hey let’s check back in after you do a few years being married.
The truth is my marriage is struggling. It has been on struggle mode for quite a while now. The funny thing is the Spousal Unit and I love, adore and cherish each other and we are truly each other’s best friend. I trust the man with my life and can’t imagine that will ever change. Despite the fact we are struggling, we still spend most of our time with each other because we enjoy it. Even in the midst of our struggles we have taken to joking we should change our respective Facebook relationship statuses to “complicated” since it really is a complicated situation.
The first time I married at 18, I knew nothing and was woefully unprepared to be married as was my first husband. So it was no shock when our marriage erupted in flames, we were a toxic heady mix, and nothing could have saved that union. Even our now almost 20 year old son over the years has acknowledged that his Dad and I were probably not a good fit. Yet we had youthful dreams and hopes.
Second time around I wasn’t a kid and knew marriage was work and figured if we worked hard together that the marriage would always be strong. Funny thing about life to use my favorite quote from John Lennon “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans”. Turns out in the real world, a couple can be strong, in love but still have issues that make them incompatible. There is no secret to staying married, and anyone who tells you otherwise is shitting you. I say that with 14 years of marriage under my belt and being the offspring of a couple that did 31 years until death parted them.
I have no idea what our future holds, at this point we take it day by day, and take the good with the ugly. Yet we both had a great laugh when I shared the so-called keys to staying married that I stumbled across, if only it were that easy. Life is messy and when you combine lives it gets even messier. Or shall we just say it’s complicated.
I read that same blog post and what I took away was something very different. The blogger who wrote that is not single, but divorced herself, so it didn’t make sense to me that she would be making any statements about marriage being simple. But based on what the old woman who’d been married a long time said to her, what I took the ultimate point of the post to mean is that – the only difference between being married 60 years and being married 6 years is not getting divorced. The younger unmarried woman who was exclaiming to the old couple about being married so long seemed to be under the assumption that they must have been SO HAPPY and had something special. But how does she know that maybe those decades weren’t crappy, full of infidelity, lack of affection, or even violence? We make a lot of assumptions about long marriages, and because they seem less and less common, we think they are better relationships. Maybe. Maybe not!
I don’t know what the blogger’s intent was – maybe it was to oversimply – but I took it another way.
I agree about laughing.
The Pseudo Husband and used to have a yearly: I hate you / we’re done blow out. I think we spent the better part of (after we lived together) two years really wondering if we should move on. For us — and this is clearly not for everyone — it took until we had almost nothing to love each other. When we were struggling, we realized the only thing we do have is each other. Our non-union is stronger than ever and we’re more at peace within the relationship.
Willing something to “work” is for the birds. It won’t happen. Newlyweds say that shit. I’m sorry that the two of you are struggling together. If it can work it will, if it can’t you’ll know. Which is so easy to write.
If you can laugh together, you can whether a lot of storms, remember that, and remember the power of touch too.
The unmarried & the newly married…a group of folks I’d love to smack for their naive advice.
It’s funny I should read this post right now, as just earlier this morning I was thinking about my own marriage– we’ve been together about 13yrs, married for 8. The years before marriage were at times pretty rocky, but since making the decision to actually marry we’ve had an amazing 8 years together.
And yet I realized today how if we are going to stay married always, it’s almost certain that we’ll go through some period when one or both of us is unhappy with our marriage and things don’t seem to be working. Right? I mean, can any couple stay together for multiple decades and not go through rough patches here and there? So now I wonder when those will be, and what will happen. We have a good history of working through some tough shit so I’m hopeful that we’ll do fine in the end….
I hope you and your spouse are able to figure things out, whatever that may mean for you. Best of luck!