I recently turned 35. I’ve been with my husband, Jeb, for
17.5 years. Do the math: I’ve been with this man half my life.
Yet not even the knowledge that comes with time can stop me from sometimes being plagued with
doubt. I often worry whether we’re doing marriage “the right way.” I don’t know about you,
but I do this thing where I look at other couples and assume they have it all
figured out, everything in their life is perfect and wonderful. I go so far as to
let others’ lives play out like movies in my mind. Other couples, watching
every TV show together, spending all night talking. Agreeing on every single opinion
about every single thing in life, ever. Skipping through dewy meadows in their
perfectly pressed clothes and clean shoes, then going home to their pristine houses. (Y’all are killing it, in my imagination.)
I wonder if people do that with me and Jeb. We have an
exceptionally well-documented life via social media, due to Jeb being a
photographer and also knowing a lot of photographers. A quick perusal of either
of our Facebook accounts reveals lots of
pretty pics of us, all made up. Tons of snaps of our kids being awesome. Photos
from tropical vacations, and warm, cozy holidays. Our social media screams
“We’re happy! SO FREAKING HAPPY!”
And that’s about half of the truth. A lot of the time, we are happy, content, doing fine.
And a lot of the time, we’ve struggled.
Getting married is
easy. You find someone you love. You think, yeah, I could spend my life with
this person. You have a celebration and your friends and family all show up and
everyone cries. The world is your oyster; everything is possible.
It’s staying
married that’s hard.
If you’d have asked me at twenty-three, which is how old I
was when I got married, I’d have predicted that over the years, I’d change very
little—I knew who I was, what I wanted, the road I was headed down. I had it
all figured out.
Except I didn’t and I didn’t have enough foresight to see
that I didn’t.
People can change a hell of a lot over time, and I think
it’s possible that Jeb and I changed more than most. I pursued many years of
higher education, and due to that, was exposed to ideas and people and
adversity and growth and culture in a way that molded me, shaped me, carved me
into a different person. As for Jeb, he left his job as a public school
educator and became a full-time photographer/creative. He learned that he needs
to be making things, thinking outside of the box, and not answering to a
hierarchy to feel fulfilled through his work.
We also became parents of two kiddos in a span of twenty
months, so as we were stretching and learning and developing our singular
identities, we were also immersed in the task of keeping tiny humans alive.
The years marched on. I got my PhD and started a private
practice. The kids started school. We went to family celebrations. We hung out
with friends. We did date nights sometimes. We traveled. We pursued individual
hobbies and interests. We built a house and moved to a lovely new neighborhood.
And then one day in our thirties we woke up and realized we
had no idea who the other was. I won’t speak for his side of it, but my
personal awakening came with the question: Why are we together? We had
different groups of friends. We didn’t read the same books, or necessarily
gravitate to the same kinds of media, or have any hobbies in common. I loved Jeb,
but I didn’t know why I was with him anymore.
At about the same time I was grappling with these serious
questions about my marriage, I became depressed— so depressed I couldn’t even
see straight. It seemed like every decision I’d ever made in my life was wrong.
I questioned my entire existence as a human being: where I’d come from, what I
was doing now, where I was going. It was hell. And Jeb got angry and withdrew. He
didn’t know what to do with me; didn’t understand what I was trying to say when
I talked about my questions, about my doubts, about what wasn’t working for me
in our marriage. In hindsight, he was depressed, too, but men sometimes look
different when they’re depressed. (Google Masked Male depression for more on
that.)
And we fought. Good Lord, did we fight. There were tears and
storming out and many nights spent sleeping apart. I spent the night of our 11th
wedding anniversary at my parent’s house, that’s how bad it was.
We contemplated separation. We ate meals together with our
kids and had our best “everything is fine” faces on, even as I researched
apartments, always late at night, or at the office, while I wept my way through
my fifth box of Kleenex.
But in the chaos, something miraculous happened. We fought
for each other. Even through all the squabbling and miscommunicating and passive-aggression,
we kept coming back to the same point: we wanted to try. We wanted our family. We
wanted to see if we could find each other again.
So we tried. We went to therapy together, and went to
therapy individually. First, we bent. I started trying harder to listen to him
when he was sharing something he was excited about, even when I was exhausted
from listening to people all day, and even if what he was saying didn’t
interest me. He started greeting me when I came in the door after work, and
went out of his way to tell me all the ways he appreciates me. Essentially, we slowly figured out the ways we
had been failing each other and made the others’ emotional needs a priority
again. We made a few big shifts, but mostly, we made a million little changes.
And after awhile, we had bent so much that we softened; the
rigid edges of us melting. I let him back into the places in my spirit that had
long been steeled against him. Though he isn’t and will never again be the man
I married, he became a man I wanted to stay married to.
I don’t think that Jeb’s my soulmate. This is because I
don’t believe in soulmates, this idea that you can meet someone and POOF, love
happens and it’s forever and you don’t have to do anything to make it work. I
used to buy into this stuff, and sometimes that wily belief wants to come
weaseling back in—mostly when Jeb and I are struggling. I think, during those
rough times: “Oh, if only I’d found my
soulmate and married him, then I wouldn’t be going through any of this
arguing or pain or doubt.” But you know what? I call bullshit. What I really believe in is two people fighting
for each other and choosing each other again and again and again, every day. I
can’t think of any better definition of love than that.
I didn’t write this for some kind of “atta girl.” I’m not
aiming for you all to see me as a paragon of morality, because believe you me,
the level of fuck uppery that I’ve reached during these years of growth and
struggle has been unreal. I also fully anticipate that I will in some way, at some point, mess something up again. Our struggle isn't over. It's not a thing that ends. I think marriage/partnership is less like a straight line with some kind of destination that a couple can arrive at, and more like a circle with little pit stops along the path, some happy, some sad, some totally fucked up. And round and round the circle you go, hopefully learning how to navigate the rough times as you know yourself and your partner better.
I also didn’t write this to shame those of you who
have divorced or ended long term partnerships. I don’t think every relationship
can be saved, or should be.
I wrote this for the folks like me, who are sitting there
comparing their imperfect relationship to everyone else’s “perfect” one,
lurking and hiding in secret shame. If your marriage is messy, if there’s some
stain on it that you wish wasn’t there but is, if you’ve hurt your partner or
been hurt, if you’ve wondered if you made the “right” choice in a partner—you’re
not alone. You’re more normal than you think. The more I talk to people who I’m
real with, and who are real with me, the more I realize that every long term
romantic relationship has problems. It’s what we do with the problem that
matters.
As for me, I’m going to keep trying with Jeb for as long as
it makes sense to try. Being with him for half of my life hasn’t been nearly
long enough.
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| Photo: Sarah Gudeman http://www.sarahgudeman.com |
