A little look back on how we got to this point in our marriage. Now almost a decade out from our I Do’s, I thought I would share a post about what it really is like to live the, you’re just a housewife, life and my realizations over the last few years.
I can say with 100% confidence that our marriage is stronger than it has ever been, he is my person who gets me and understands just what I sacrificed for us to get to this point.
It seems like on a consistent basis my husband and I are told that we had the most amazing wedding, or that we always seem so happy and have a perfect little marriage. Well, one thing is for sure, no one has a perfect marriage, perfection takes a lot of work and after all these years, we still work our hardest every single day. We are constantly trying to make sure that we are happy together, our goals are similar, and we have set out new goals with each other to incorporate the stage of life we are in. You may think all that is crazy talk, but we truly do sit and talk to each other every single night over dinner and we try to spend all weekend together unless one of us is traveling for business or to visit family.
The biggest thing that both of us learned from our parents and grandparents is this – in order to make a relationship last through the ups and the downs you have to have communication, you have to talk it out and you have to plan it out, that is how you do life with the one you choose to do life with forever!
Don’t think for one second that I started out wanting to be a housewife. I have a BFA in design, a Masters in education, and was halfway towards a second Masters from UCLA when I realized, life needed to change or my marriage was going to fall apart, no matter how perfect it looked from the outside.
That is me being 100% honest with myself and everyone in our lives, and realizing the truth of what our situation was, but not what our life is now.
Yup, that the one-sentence almost everyone shudders at when they hear, how would your marriage fall apart, you are perfect together. The reality is that when we lived in Philadelphia we both were going in a million directions and would frequently pass in the hallway of our apartment or see each other as we walked to our cars in the morning to go to work. Our jobs were dictators, we lived and breathed them and somewhere along the way we forgot that we were actually married. We were too exhausted on the weekends to carry on real meaningful conversations. Yes, that worked, but it wouldn’t work for the long term, and we both knew it, but we were too terrified to say it out loud to each other. Fast forward, and an opportunity presented itself to my husband to allow us to change our situation without confronting the ugly truth, and we took it, not realizing that a bit more needed to change besides our zip code.
If you ask us about our time and life in Philadelphia we can’t really tell you much. It’s not that we were involved with the CIA and are legally bound to not talk about our work or life, it is just how busy our life was, we forgot what we did. I can tell you how to get to Trader Joes and the best time to grab lunch at Wegman’s. I can direct you to the Tory Burch store and how to get in and out in under 30 minutes, just in time to get to your next meeting, but I can’t tell you what my husband and I did on any given free weekend we had together.
My husband can tell you he discovered sushi for the first time while living in Philadelphia and made some amazing business partners. I can’t, however, tell you what holidays were like together, I am not even sure we had a Christmas tree in our last apartment. I don’t remember actually making real meals for us to eat, or if we actually took vacations. Life took over and we forgot what we were supposed to do as a married couple.
That life I do not wish on anyone. It is not the way you should start any marriage, and it has taken us until now to realize that it is not what we ever wanted or what anyone should ever strive to have. I won’t lie, being work-a-holics paid off big time for both of us, we have been extremely blessed and fortunate in this life, but it almost came with a price – our marriage and happiness.
We knew from the first date we went on together that we never wanted children, so in the end we would have had nothing holding us together, it would have been very easy to walk away, but instead I put my life on hiatus and moved to the South for my husband to pursue his goals, and it’s worked out tremendously for both of us. It’s not to say I will never go back and complete my goals in life, but for now they aren’t what would pay the bills or give our life substance, I would rarely have weekends with my husband and as he says, he would still work as much as he does now, even if I was the one pursuing my dreams and making an income. I am okay with that because sometimes taking care of someone is the most rewarding job around. Moms do it every single day, so why can’t a housewife also do it and feel the same way? The answer is, she can, and I do.
So, when people question why I stay at home and take care of my husband it is because of this – I am actually taking care of myself. I don’t want to be a thirty-something divorced woman. I worked for my marriage and I will do anything to make sure that we keep what we have. Marriage is not easy, anyone who says that it is, doesn’t have a strong marriage. This takes a ton of work every single day, but it is the work that I love to do, it just took me a while to get to this point.
You may be thinking, what is she going on about, but it is simple. As we head into the season of distractions it is so important to sit back and focus on what you have or what you are missing in your life. My husband and I never took the time to sit back and see that we were just going through the motions each day, that is not what your life should be about. You should not create a life of busy, but a life of balance.
So my point, sometimes to fulfill your goals in life, you have to sacrifice some things and know that if they were meant to be they will come back one day, but isn’t it better to actually have the most amazing marriage ever, then to just have what looks like an amazing marriage from the outside. Like I said, everyone has a different situation and a different story, but I felt it was time to stop sugar-coating my why for being a housewife. I love it. I wouldn’t change a single thing about these years together, and to be able to say that makes my heart smile.
If you had asked me when we were getting married where I would be today, it is not this life and I know that I would have regretted that answer 100 percent because this is the life I always wanted, I just didn’t know it at the time.
I can with all the confidence in the world say that my marriage today is better than it was when we got married, and isn’t that how it is supposed to be? I don’t want to have a marriage that “survives” challenges and ups and downs, I want a marriage that makes me smile and laugh every single day, and I have that, I just had to change my perspective on what the perfect life and marriage were. I don’t think struggles and sacrifices daily make your marriage perfect, I think it makes for a stressful situation and doesn’t give you the ability to really enjoy each other. Yes, my husband and I have a unique situation that allows only one of us to have to work. We have a situation that gives us a ton of time to spend together without distractions, but everyone can have this, you just have to make a few changes and give up a few things. I know with all my heart that if I had a huge goal I wanted to accomplish my husband would support me, but it’s not what I want right now, I want to see my husband complete all of his dreams and goals and in order for that to happen he needs to have zero distractions at home. So I will gladly be the CFO, CEO, head chef, laundromat, handyman, and secretary of our household.
So as a true southerner – buckle up
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