Marriage Sucks!

Now before you all start tweeting, texting, emailing, instagramming the latest gossip of a marriage in trouble please let me explain the title of this blog. I think it is so easy for people to glamorize their marriages, I know I am guilty of posting romantic pictures of my husband and I in some far off place holding each other tight locked in a passionate kiss, or posting sentimental here say of how much we are in love or showing the world the flowers HE surprised me with just because. So yes, I am guilty of shouting on the mountain top I am in love, BUT yes there is a but.....all that doesn't come without daily work, effort, struggles, ups, downs, sometimes more downs than ups, "I'm sorry" yes lots and lots of sorry's. There are many days that I feel marriage is overrated, I wonder how the Jones' keep it all together....oh wait the grass is not always greener on the other side. The Jones's yes you know that family we all so want to keep up with and they seem to have everything so perfectly perfect in every sense of the word, and I wonder how they do it. Then I realize there is no PERFECT marriage in the sense that they have all of their ducks in a row and none of them ever stray from that damn row.

 

We can all go back to the day it all began and we met our significant other, our soul mate, the love of our lives and it reminds us of the way we felt when we were in each others presence. The way we looked at each other with such passion, love and desire. The way we touched each other and how it made our hearts skip a beat, the way it made us feel when little love notes where placed all over in surprise locations just to remind us how much we are loved. The days of holding hands, wanting to cuddle, needing to be touched and desires of wanting to be in their arms forever. All those things came so naturally and were a part of our every day functioning. Then we got comfortable with one another I mean really really comfortable. So comfortable the things we feared doing in front of the other just started happening because we were so comfortable. Things like belching, using the bathroom with the door wide open, cleaning out our noses without trying to hide it, scratching privates, you know our true human nature started to shine brightly with golden halo rings around it. Not that that is a bad thing, it's good to be comfortable with the one we love, but somehow being comfortable took away from some of the romance, and we are left to wonder when did things stray south?

It begins to seem like we are treading water and trying so hard to bring that initial feeling of love back that we are missing the new love that has been created. So he doesn't make my heart pitter patter in the mornings, well he does but not it the sense of pitter patter bat the eyelashes. It's more the feeling of beating out of your chest because he's such a happy chipper let's get this day started morning person and I'm well.......so NOT!! Or when he tells me I am beautiful for the 7 millionth time it begins to feel like a broken record player, and I roll my eyes because after all he married me and he is obligated to tell me I am beautiful right......wrong! When I scratch his head, or rub his shoulders, or place a kiss on his neck it doesn't take him back to the feelings he had for me twenty years ago, it takes him to the feelings of love he has for me now. Why are we constantly seeking the love that we had when we first met? We are not the same people we were ten, fifteen or twenty years ago why should our love be the same? We so want to put on blinders to the way we are loved, loving, and wanting to love that we are missing the wonderful love that is blooming and growing right in front of us. Why are we not seeing it? Life that's why.

Then we decide we are not complete until we throw some kids into the mixture and if you really want to test your marriage this is the perfect way to do it. Nothing is ever the same after little Johnny comes along and it's no longer just you and him it's now we three then us four and if you haven't learned after becoming a party of five then you just keep going. Don't get me wrong I love my kids to death and I am so grateful for the blessing of them because more than anything in the world I wanted to be a wife and mommy. But yes......another BUT there is no lying about the change of dynamics children will place on your marriage. Date nights what are those, quite long amounts of bedroom time just the two of you.....ummm sure if your sleeping. You begin to always think little eyeballs are staring at you from under the door. Then when they begin to talk they will knock okay bang on the closed locked door and yell "I know what you guys are doing in there" and if that isn't a mood killer. Then they reach the age where they really do know what you are doing in there but yet they don't knock or announce their presence AND you forgot to lock the door and well yep alone time FAIL. You begin to see that life no longer is revolving around marriage but around being parents. We start to drift and it takes a moment in time to wake us up and draw us closer so we are not just running through the motions. After all it was your love that created the kids in the first place. Once again a new love is being formed and you no longer see him as that sexy single stud you did twenty years ago. You begin to grow a new love for the man as you watch him interact with your kids, your heart fills with joy when you see him on the basketball court as he teaches his boy for the first time how to dribble a basketball, or at the park teaching him to ride a bike or out back throwing a football or in the bedroom teaching him how to be a man and how to throw a punch in case one day he needs to protect himself. At this moment in time the man of your dreams has suddenly become the hottest man on the planet. See that love that you felt all those years ago has not gone anywhere, it's just changed its a different kind of love you just have to notice it. It's when we begin to convince ourselves that that love is gone that marriage sucks. Marriage isn't easy and it seems like the days of our young love are gone and that this is what we get for the rest of our lives, but it doesn't have to be like that. We just need to open our eyes to the new love that is forming, growing, and changing to see that our hearts have always been full of love just a different kind of love. Marriage sucks in the sense that it's not perfect, and it is a work in progress, and it takes daily effort from both of us. Let's think about it for a minute.....there are approximately 7 billion people in the world and the two of us, the two of you, the two of them found each other.......

 


There are days that yes marriage just stinks, just like being a parent sticks and you have convinced yourself you don't know what you are doing, being a grown up stinks, and we continue to ask where is never never land, being an employee stinks doing hard labor for little pay, being a boss stinks having to dictate who does the hard work for little pay, but it's what you do with that day that makes every other day of being married, a parent, grown up, employee, boss all so worth it.

 

 

 

Marriage is a two way street.....not my way or his way it's OUR way. When he comes home after a long day at work and sweeps me in his arms and kisses me and tells me I'm beautiful even though it looks like I have not seen a shower in days, I smell like the skunk met his match with the sewer, and I am in mommy yoga pants that have gone out of style years ago.....the man I met and fell in love with twenty years ago hasn't left the building and thinks I am beautiful even at my homeliest how is that not the best marriage eveR?