Every marriage goes through cycles. The truth is, you’ll never be able to stop working at making it work… but eventually, the work will seem much less like work because doing the things that make your marriage successful will begin to come naturally. The worst thing parents can do is to lose themselves their title of “mommy” or “daddy” because then life becomes something other than your own. In denying yourself separation from the parenting role, you’re sacrificing the most essential part of marriage – the ability to be selfish (yes, it’s important to value your own desires!) and the ability to focus on your spouse and their desires. Life starts revolving around diapers and midnight feedings… carpools, laundry, grocery shopping, scheduling, planning, budgeting, working, juggling… homework, playdates, parties, school projects… After a while, you grow accustomed to dedicating all of your {limited} free time to PTA meetings, bake sales, awards day ceremonies, and ensuring that everything remains in place so that all your plans to create the best possible future for your kids works out like you envisioned it. Anyone want to tell me what is sexy, sensual, or seductive about any of that? I thought not.

When kids come along, a lot of the old spontaneity dies. If you have kids before marriage, the excitement never really develops (or never gets a chance to climax) and if you have them after you’ve been married a while, the excitement you once had quickly goes missing. Nothing is fresh; nothing is new… and you fall into a mundane state of just simply “being” together instead of really BEING TOGETHER. Barry and I have also been together off and on since the middle of my freshman year of high school… we created a LOT of hardships, heartaches, mistakes, drama, and memories we’d rather forget along the way. There have been several points in our relationship/marriage that we were <—this—> close to throwing it all away. All the frustrations and stresses just stopped seeming worth the trouble. The truth was, they were totally worth it and those things were what eventually convinced us that what we had was worth fighting for… it was all the things that made us want to give up that actually made us realize how much we meant to each other; how much we never wanted to let go.

How do we stay interested in one another after nearly 9 years of marriage and 13 years of being together? We make time for each other. When he says he wants to spend time with me, I don’t say I have something to finish up. I don’t say wait until tomorrow. I stop and I give him my attention. The same goes for him. When I ask him to do something for me, he doesn’t make excuses. What it boils down to is that whether we put the kids to bed, find a babysitter, or send them in the other room, we don’t sacrifice our marital happiness by forgetting that we each have needs. Mine are mostly emotional; his are mostly physical (haha) but that is just how we tick. Making what is important to one another our top priority means that neither of us feel neglected. As simple as that is, it took us YEARS to figure out. I guess something started to click in our minds when we realized that his most frequently voiced complaint about me was that I was married to my computer and mine was that he was married to himself. We both felt like regardless of whether it was the kids or our own ambitions, “life” was seeming to choke the life out of our communication and taking all of our time and attention. So we decided something had to change. ALL of it had to change.

It almost saddens me when people ask me how Barry and I have such a great marriage with so many kids because it’s hard to explain just how close we came to never knowing this life; never knowing this love… I hate when people compare their relationship to someone else’s because I know from experience that just because two people are great together and are very much in love NOW doesn’t mean it was always that way. I think we have a horrid habit of assuming that the present is indicative of how things have always been and that couldn’t be farther from the truth in most cases. Most couples that are extremely close are that way because at one point, they were presented with the prospect of losing one another which forced them to consider what was – and was not – important as well as what needed to be done to make things work that hadn’t worked before. Everything in life is about balance. Anyone who tells you their relationship has always been perfect is either a pathological liar or completely oblivious to everything that is going on around them. There just simply isn’t such a thing as perfection, especially not when you have two identities merging as one. You have to have a sun and a moon; a yin and a yang; a light and a dark; a good and a bad; a love and a hate… the truth is nothing exists without its opposite and you can’t truly appreciate one without truly having known the other.

If you have been feeling like being together isn’t worth the effort anymore, maybe your time as come to do what every successful couple has done – go through the reevaluation stage. I think knowing that everyone goes through it makes it much easier to go through. No one ever really talked to me about what makes a successful marriage successful. My mom was single until after I was married. My sister has been married twice and isn’t married now. My brother has never been married. My younger sister was married briefly. The only successful marriage I ever witnessed was my grandparents, but neither of them ever talked to me about marriage. My husband and I got married when I was just barely 18 and he was just as ignorant about marriage as I was. We screwed it up royally for the first 2 years or so and the fact that we had 3 kids by then didn’t help. We struggled with ourselves. We struggled as parents. We struggled against one another. We struggled together. We struggled. A lot… until we eventually (after hating the sight of one another and actually preparing our divorce papers) we started getting it right every now and then. We started realizing how much we didn’t want to give up. We sat down and talked about what was wrong, which initially created resentments that only made things worse LOL but the biggest thing we learned through learning to effectively communicate was that in order to have enough wisdom, respect, and insight to survive enjoy (hehe) the rest of our lives together, we would first have to allow all of those stresses test the fabric of our bond so that we would know if we were strong enough to make it through anything. And we have – we’ve made it through everything.

The problem with so many couples these days is that no one wants to “waste their time” making things work. I remember a couple of years ago, one of Barry’s teammates said that when he gets married, he wants a marriage like ours. I get comments all the time from people who say how much in love they can tell we are. Those are great compliments; I love hearing things like that… but more than anything, those things remind me that there were several points our marriage was just a MESS. We actually almost divorced twice. And I don’t mean just threatening to get each other’s attention. I mean papers ready to file with the Chancery court. THAT close. What I learned from our experiences is that if people wouldn’t give up on each other so quickly they probably WOULD have a good love. When things get bad, that’s normally a sign they are about to just get BETTER. People have the wrong idea of what marriage is… too many people assume that if it is hard, it isn’t worth it when the truth is that it is actually those same hardships that end up MAKING it worth it in the long run. You want to know something interesting about our almost-13-year long relationship? About half of it SUCKED big time! lol But here’s the kicker for me: if we had to go through 6-7 years of hard times, trust issues, arguments, and uncertainty in order to build a lifetime of secure, loving, unquestionable marital partnership, I’ll take it.

I cannot imagine my life without my husband. There are still days when I want to scratch his eyes out with the dog’s nail clippers LMBO but it’s always over something small and we always end up laughing about our arguments when we’re done haha The arguments are few and far between … and we don’t make as big of a deal out of things as we used to. The thing that makes me CRAZY most of the time is that he puts EVERYTHING on top of the fridge. He has done that for YEARS. I’m only 5’4″. I can’t SEE on top of the fridge nor can I REACH up there. But EVERY time he asks me to bring him something, guess where it ends up being after I search EVERYWHERE it SHOULD have been? Yep, the fridge. As stupid as that seems, little things like that are actually the cause of MOST of our arguments because (on both sides) we’ve told one another little things like this a THOUSAND times and it ends up being an issue of consideration with both of us insisting to the other, “YOU DON’T LISTEN TO ANYTHING I SAY!” But that’s a much better argument than, “WHOSE PHONE NUMBER IS THIS ON YOUR BILL?” lol Because, yes, we’ve had those arguments in years past.

I’m going to wrap up this extremely long post by kind of compacting my point. There are going to be times in your marriage when you feel like you’re growing apart. You’re going to have times that you question if your love is strong enough to keep it all together. You’re going to have times when you think the kids, the bills, or your jobs are going to be the death of your closeness and/or intimacy. Marriage takes work but if you stick in there through all the tough times, you will find that you get to a point where you look back and are thanking God daily that He never allowed you to cave under the pressure. When you’re merging two lives into one, can you really ever expect things to go smoothly? No matter how alike two people are, you are always going to come in with your own preconceived ideas of what things should be like and heads are going to butt. That’s life. Move past it – together. Don’t compare your life to others; no matter how well you know someone, you’ll never know anything they don’t want you to know. Every couple has their troubles. Don’t accept advice about your life from people who are unaffected by the decisions you make. They don’t have to pay for bad advice.

I’m tired of typing so for now, that’s it :) Love is always worth the effort. Period.


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