by Claralynn Schnell of ContemporaryVA

Happily ever after or just ever after? Anyone who is married will tell you that there are bad times, days where you dislike your spouse and days where you wonder what you were thinking when you married them.  I have been married for 3 ½ years to a wonderful man named Randy, and while he is wonderful that doesn’t stop me from wanting to kill him some times, today in particular.  Whoever tells you that marriage isn’t work has obviously never been married.  It is that work, if you are willing to do it, that will allow you to have a healthy and happy marriage. 

Disagreements during marriage are healthy.  You are combining two completely different people who were raised by different parents and asking them to live together in a house and live as a united couple.  Doesn’t seem too difficult?? Wait until you have kids and then big fundamental differences will arise.  We have two kids under 3 years old and I stay at home and raise them, as well as work, clean the house, cook the meals and go to school full time, needless to say my stress level is high.  My husband works full time and is in graduate school.  Both of us worked our entire lives and because of that we had extreme work ethics.  We both want to raise our boys with that same ethic, however, we both want to go at it a different way! Differences are what make marriage interesting.

We have typical roles in our family, he works and brings home the check.  He takes out the trash.  I stay home and raise the kids, cook and clean.  There are days that we struggle.  Days that I resent him for getting to go to a job. Days that he resents me for getting to stay home.  (He has a deluded impression that raising kids and cleaning and cooking is a luxury. While I forget how much going to a job can be draining).  How do we survive?? Communication!!! We talk to each other.  We listen.  We fight. We make up and then we compromise.

Knowing how you as an individual reacts to certain situations is an important step to being able to overcome an argument and find a middle ground.  I for example tend to react in a passive aggressive manner.  For example, if Randy says that he doesn’t have a social life and I do, and that he is doing too much cleaning of the house, I cancel all plans and make the house spotless to make him feel like a jerk when he gets home.  Is that healthy? Probably not, but I know how I react, I know what I do when he makes me angry.  When I make Randy angry, he broods.  He will come home and ignore everything or pretend like we never got into an argument and he wasn’t a jerk. (Yes, I happen to believe he is a jerk when we fight.)

Does our marriage sound pretty typical? I believe so.  When you become a parent, you tend to give up so much of yourself to accommodate for a family.  Take a breath, take time out and nurture your marriage.  Make a date night once a month and do something you enjoy.  We went on a date yesterday to the shooting range (my idea) and then went and had dinner.  We swap with our neighbors once a month so that we can each get time away from our kids and remember why it is that we fell in love with our spouse.  It is healthy to fight.  It is healthy to be angry.  But in the end, remember that you married that person for a reason. Find that reason and fall in love with your spouse on a daily basis.

Nothing that is easy is usually worth it.