Happily Ever After

Fairy tales can create a false dimension. They tell you that the girl meets the boy of her dreams, who fights off dragons for her and then pulls her up onto his horse and rides off into the sunset. Everything is blissfully perfect and ends happily ever after.

First of all, my husband and I broke up three times during our year-long dating relationship. Three months after we got married, we got pregnant and my husband lost his job three months before our baby was born. We had to move in with family, put our belongings in storage and live in one room. When our newborn was three months old, we moved to a different state where I got a job while my husband finished a degree.

With all these transitions within the first year and a half of marriage, you can imagine all of the different dynamics we needed to work through. When you get married you have to begin understanding your spouse, how they communicate, their sensitivities, what pushes their buttons, what creates intimacy, and how to create boundaries.

Honestly, I was still figuring out all those dynamics for myself, let alone trying to figure out a whole different person. Now throw in all those transitions we were making, Yikes! Chaos. One of the key lessons we learned over the first few years was that when our expectations for each other are realistic and are communicated to each other is when we have the healthiest relationship between us. It took a lot of work to get to that place.

But one of the areas my husband is just amazing at, is communicating. He does not like to let something get brushed under the rug and act like everything is okay. He wants to get to the bottom of it and figure out the how, why, when, what, and who of it. This has forced me to become more communicative, which in turn has helped me to get out of my head and understand who my husband is, what his likes are, why he gets upset, and how I can show him that I love, respect, and cherish him.

He in turn has an easier time to do the same for me when I communicate clearly with him. Another point that has really helped me let go of my frustrations and change my attitude is to remember that there are always two sides to a coin. When I’m frustrated with my husband about something, I tend to get caught up in my opinion of what happened, how his response was wrong, or how I have the right to be upset. This probably happens in 6 out of 10 fights that we have. And each time it happens, I lose out on some of our closeness and some of that trust that could be shared between us actually decreases.

In those moments what helps me (the four times that I actually am able to) is to step back fromthe situation and look at it through his eyes. Making an effort to pay attention to the frustration he is feeling is a gauge on how much he doesn’t feel heard at that moment. You know what helps me to take a pause – washing some dishes, or picking up my knitting or crocheting so I am doing something with my hands, which then helps me calm down and think about what happened.

The reason I’m able to do this now is because at the beginning of our marriage we went to a counselor. People recommended going to counseling before marriage but we actually went once before and then a couple times after we got married. Doing that was one of the best decisions because when we went to the counselor after marriage we had actually stepped into a completely different realm of relating that no other relationship can do.

In some ways marriage is a culmination of all the different relationships you’ve been in throughout your life; that is, the dynamics you experience in past relationships are experienced in your marriage in fuller ways. Some of the best tools the counselor gave us for our marriage were ways to After 7 years of marriage we are still learning how to fight well. I know that we will only keep getting better.

The importance of this is that you accept the fact that couples do fight, each in their own way. What is essential to your relationship is learning how each of you fight and coming up with a process that helps you articulate your feelings, frustrations, and disagreements in a way that doesn’t demean, disrespect, and hurt your spouse.

Another way to help in that process is to stay positive! One of the issues I have is that I get frustrated about something small and then get stuck in it. After that if anything else happens I get even more frustrated and start losing my temper. It really helps me to stop, go into the kitchen or sit in my rocking chair in the living room and take some deep breaths. That helps me calm down and gives me space to tell myself that I can stay calm and that if I can become positive it will lighten the mood for everyone and we will actually have a good time. It works wonders! Especially for our kids. They know then, that they don’t have to step lightly around mama and that I will absorb their frustrations and emotional upheaval and give them space to breathe as well. For my husband, well he’d rather be around a happy person than one who keeps snapping at everything and everyone. I know I wouldn’t want to be around “annoyed me”.

Staying positive and respecting each other by listening to each other’s needs and wants makes it easier to enjoy each other. That’s such an essential part of keeping your relationship going through the stress that every day brings. The stress of your job, your babies, your extended family and others can be overwhelming sometimes.

But when you can come home and be with the person who is safe and supportive of you, those stressors can take a back seat and you can breathe in and feel refreshed. It’s important then to be intentional about spending time together. You both need that in order to let the other person know that you cherish, love, respect , appreciate and enjoy them.

Go out for dinner, or a movie, or a coffee, or a glass of wine, or stay in and play some board games together, or watch a movie at home, or go for a walk, or sit on the verandah with a nice hot cup of chai with pakoras. There are so many options. Aim at having fun and enjoying each other. Finding an older couple who you can trust and look up to is a wonderful resource for you as a couple. An older couple has been through years of stress, hardship, ups and downs. They have perfected ways of keeping their relationship going through it all. Get together with them on a regular basis and open up about the stress that’s overwhelming you the most currently.

This creates a healthy partnership between you that assures you that you are an equal and valued member in the relationship. My husband and I believe wholeheartedly in an egalitarian relationship where each partner is given equal responsibility and authority. This spills into how we make decisions, how we discipline our children, and how we relate to each other and others.

Find what works best for you and talk it out so each of you feels heard and respected. Create a relationship health checklist that you as a couple can assess when you meet together, either monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, every six months, or yearly. Whatever you two decide as a couple will work best for you. Put things on the check list that are indicators for both of you of on whether the relationship is flourishing and healthy or floundering and distant.

For example: “when our relationship is healthy, we..”

• laugh together,
• are more vulnerable about our thoughts, views, and weaknesses
• hold equal responsibility
• don’t want to pressure and force our spouse to make us feel loved and respected.

Something else that really helps my husband and I is talking about our priorities and expectations monthly. Now we do try to do this monthly, but sometimes we miss it. When we do though, it helps put our relationship back on track, it helps clear the air on some expectations we might have on certain situations or issues, and it helps give our family direction.

We have learned that writing things down in the order of importance really helps us discuss and assess those topics. Talking through those issues really brings us close together as a couple because we then know what the other person is thinking about. It also helps us know that we’re a team working together to create a good home for our children and each other.

All of these are methods that have helped my husband and I as a couple to flourish and continuously grow through whatever comes our way in life. The way we have come to understand it is that life is like music, there is a beginning and an end and there is a wonderful sound in the middle filled with tempos, beats, minors, majors, staccatos, harmonies, dissonances, crescendos, and adagios. Continue to work together as a couple and let your music fill your home and your community.