A Little Understanding Goes A Long Way

It is hard to share your life with someone. I don’t care if the two of you are soulmates or best friends or were 100% matched on a dating website. Life is a challenge and sharing your life with someone else is filled with ups and downs. I do not think that it’s as easy as getting to know someone before saying “I do” that gives you an automatic PASS when it comes to marriage. I don’t think it’s having the same likes or dislikes or goals or ambitions. During a relationship, anything can happen. LIFE happens. And Life is a bitch. Life wakes you up with a phone call to tell you a loved one has passed. Life brings a hurricane to your area and demolishes your belongings. Life diagnosis you with an illness. Or Life blesses you with babies and fortune and so many decisions to make. Life is hard and it gets harder when you have to merge two together and make it mesh.

Anyone can get married. Anyone can get divorced. It takes a strong set of people to keep their shit together till death do them part. I think of my grandparents when I think of marriage. Both sets were together until the very end. I think about what they had gone through. Wars, recessions, bankruptcy, loss, births, jobs, children. They had lives filled with almost every circumstance, obstacle, miracle and situation I can think of. I find it amazing to have lived a life full of it all. Not only do I find it fascinating to go through all of these moments in a lifetime, but to go through it all with another person and to survive it and better yet when given the option; to choose to want to live it all over again with the same person is simply fascinating to me.

I’d consider myself newly married. It’s only been a little over 2 years. In that time we have had misunderstandings and fights and babies and good news and bad news and job losses and job opportunities, celebrations and decisions to make. I’m learning every day that Life is hard and it’s great and it’s complicated and it’s exciting and it’s unknown. I also consider myself lucky to have someone to share this life with. Even in the times where I feel full of anger or frustration toward my husband and think that there’s no possible way we will ever figure marriage out or get through what Life has thrown at us… we do. We some how figure it out. It may not be pretty how we (mostly I) react to it, but we get through it or celebrate it together. It all comes down to this…understanding.

I’m not a doctor. I have no degrees in psychology or psychiatry but I do have experience in marriage and so far, after the things we’ve been through together and all that Life has coming to us, we need to understand each other. Who we are. Who we aren’t. Our strengths and our weaknesses. Without understanding I don’t think a marriage can survive. When we stop understanding each other, we may as well give up. Most fights or complications happen because we don’t understand each other. Life gets messy but it also gets beautiful and both parts need us to be understanding toward each other. So, while I know that sometimes people have to separate or get divorced…if this helps anyone who may be where I have been in a new marriage, just try and understand each other when Life happens. Good or bad. A little understanding goes a long way.