I am no marriage expert.
Far far far from it. As in, get a passport and book a flight far. After managing to stay married for 16 years, what I do have is experience. When we celebrated our anniversary this month, I posted some pictures of my husband and me on Facebook. It got more likes than anything I have ever posted. Ever. At first, I was a little embarrassed, and then I started to think it was kind of weird that so many people noticed. Finally, I thought, HECK YEAH. Marriage is one of my greatest accomplishments. Harder than a college degree. Harder than childbirth. Harder than getting blackberry vomit out of beige carpet (don’t ask). So while I’m no expert, I do have a few ideas to share.
I know there are plenty of couples who have been married a lot longer than we have been. Perhaps you even have parents or grandparents celebrating 30 or 50 years together. Hopefully, you’ve been able to sit with them and soak in some of their marriage wisdom. I would not suggest I have more to offer than they do. I might, however, have something different, as a person of a different generation than our parents or grandparents, as a person still in the thick of it with children living in my house.
From what I can gather, most marriages have rough patches.
Yep, that was plural. More than one. So I am not exactly confident that it will be smooth sailing from here on out. I’ve heard that teenagers can cause some serious upheaval in a marriage so we’ve got that to look forward to. I’ve seen friends’ marriages derailed by infidelity, addiction, midlife angst, mental health issues–so many things. Some of those rough patches are like a speed bump, while others are more like slamming into a concrete barrier at 70 miles per hour.
For us, three precious, wanted, planned babies in four years almost did us in. The exhaustion, financial strain, different visions of family life, unclear expectations, resentment, separate social lives–it all created a distance that we just couldn’t seem to overcome. So, how did we? If you’re in a rough patch, I hope some of the things we did can help you see your way through it as well.
Get help. My instinct was to put my head down and keep going. I thought we could just wait it out–until the kids were bigger, until we weren’t so mad at each other, until he stopped being so stubborn, whatever. My husband had the wisdom to seek out a counselor, realizing we couldn’t continue on as we were. Looking back, I can see that we could not have figured this out on our own. Neither of us could see past our resentment to see the other person’s perspective, to see a solution, or to see a vision of our future together. We needed another person for that, a trained, skilled empathetic person. If the first place you seek help isn’t that person, keep looking.
Tell (a few trustworthy) people. No one knew there was anything wrong with us. We kept our disagreements to ourselves, and so our very best friends had no idea we were having trouble. Once they knew, we were surrounded with loving support. Three couples and my mom made sure that we had free babysitting weekly for date nights and meetings with our therapist without even needing to ask for it. Instead of asking, “Can I help?,” they said, “Drop the kids off on Tuesday.” Many of those same people prayed hard for us. I may not be a very religious person, but I can’t help but think all of that positive energy sent out into the universe on our behalf somehow helped.
Surround yourself with people who support your marriage. These are not necessarily the people you want to be around. It’s comforting to be around people who sympathize–the recently divorced friend who agrees with you that marriage is hard and perhaps not really worth it, the co-worker who will take you out for a fun night on the town to drown your frustrations, or the person who agrees with every complaint you have about your spouse and doesn’t know what you ever saw in him in the first place. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with these people. Maybe they are good friends. But they are not the people to hang out with if your marriage is like a rapidly sinking ship. Instead, surround yourself with people who are happy to be married (so they can remind you why you want to be), who knew you and your spouse during happier times (so they can remind you of them), who are not experiencing the same rough patch at the moment, who wholeheartedly want to see your marriage last, people who love you, your spouse, your kids, and your marriage as their own.
Date night. I know, it’s hard. It’s money you might not have. It’s time you definitely don’t have. It’s motivation and energy you don’t want to give. But it’s necessary. If you have forgotten why you ever liked this person living in your house or if you haven’t had a conversation about anything unrelated to children, chores, or bills in months, you must get out and do something fun together. Every week. Arrange a babysitting swap, sell some stuff at a secondhand store, enlist friends or grandparents, and go somewhere. You can seriously do a date night for $10 if you are willing and committed. Go be together, alone, and have some fun. That reminds me–do something fun and don’t talk too much. (Dancing, hiking, biking, golf, bowling all come to mind.) Date night is about remembering why you like each other, and during a rough patch, talking often leads to fighting. S0, less talking and more fun on date night. And at the end of date night…
Have sex. There, I said it. Date night should be fun, right? And sex is fun. Or at least, it should be. And if you’ve been really angry and distant for a while, it might not be happening on a regular basis. If you just don’t want to, well, figure out how to want to. Maybe it’s reading a chapter of 50 Shades of Grey or taking a long hot shower or just getting started anyway, even if you don’t want to–make like Nike and just do it. The reality is that sex connects us in a way that is uniquely and intimately tied to marriage. Without it, a spouse can start to seem more like a roommate, and that is not a nice way to be married.
Don’t give up. If you’re in a rough patch, I can’t say what the key is to get past it. I can’t say how long it’s going to last. I can’t say that it won’t happen again. I can’t say that there aren’t some very good reasons to end a marriage. All that said, if you want to stay married, don’t give up. There were times I wanted to, but my husband held us together. There were times he wanted to give up, and I was too stubborn to agree. And much to the surprise of him, me, some of our friends and family, and our therapist, we came out better for it on the other side. It took us a long time to realize we had a serious problem, decide to fix it, and figure out how to by doing all the things above. It was hard and I didn’t know if it was going to be worth it, but I am so glad we kept trying anyway.
If you’ve had a rough patch and survived it, what helped? Maybe your experience will be the key to helping someone else out of their rough patch too. Maybe it will even help me next year when (gulp!) we have a teenager.
