This year has been hard in all the ways, but it's also been a lot of forced togetherness and not in a healthy, romantic way. It’s been fear-filled, anxiety-ridden, and depression-inducing. It’s been a lot for a partner to bear and that goes both ways. It’s us and them. We’ve all shown our ugly side this past year because the world’s been an ugly place.
I’ve been married a really long time, half of my life I’ve been with the same man I met in college.
Not going to lie, sometimes you can look at the other person and you just wonder if this is it.
Is this really as good as it’s ever going to get? Your day is going horribly and you find yourself asking if you would be better off alone? It’s scary. Where did those feelings come from? Is it the world just weighing too heavily on your mind and you need an escape plan? Have you wasted your life this far? Is the midlife crisis you never saw coming? Or is this the evolution of marriage?
Other days, you scream at the top of your lungs because he told you to wring out the dishrag he clearly saw you just wring out in front of him.
Other days, he curtly tells you he knows how to drive when you asked if he put his signal on. Or the time during pandemic when I slammed the dishwasher door shut with a spoon hanging out in frustration and broke the whole damn thing. We had the third fight of our 22-year marriage and — for a moment — I almost demanded a divorce. It hurts your feelings.
Everyone has those kinds of days, especially under the pressure the world has been putting us all under since this pandemic started.
But you have to remember that you love this person and maybe you’re just having a really bad day and the only thing they are really guilty of is being near you when you are not your best. The only thing you can do when you misdirect your anger towards an innocent spouse is apologize after the fact. None of us are perfect and we all make mistakes.
Pandemic or not, butterflies give way to something deeper. There is a beauty in comfortable silences. Being able to just sit next to someone and feel at home while doing absolutely nothing is next level relationship.
But what happens when you get complacent? What if your comfort is mistaken for disinterest? What if the other person feels unseen and unheard? What if your marriage is slowly dying and you thought it was growing? Communication is the key to longevity in relationships. These are all thoughts that plagued me over the past 17 months.
You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable sometimes and that means speaking up when it's hard and saying things that the other person might not want to hear because you care. When you stop caring enough to fight about the important things, that's the silence you should really worry about.
There is no doubt that this pandemic has been hard on everyone's marriage.
I feel terrible to say it, but there are days when his chewing or simply his face, after a day of feeling like I couldn't escape this pandemic, has been enough to make me pop off. I'm sure there are days when seeing me in a top knot and sweat pants for the 375th time this year, aggressively asking him to pass the salt, has made him want to go out for milk and never come back, too.
Luckily for me, he is way more laid-back than I am. He walks away where I confront, because sometimes you need a good fight to relieve the tension and then make up and wake up the next day and start fresh.
The bottom line is that if you’re feeling this way, you're not alone — so many of us are right here with you.
Forgive yourself and forgive your spouse. Talk it out. Make up and move forward. You decide if it was a momentary lapse of judgment on a bad day or an unforgivable act.
Either way, harboring hate and exacting revenge and punishment is not the way, sis. Grudges in marriage are not your friend and it will only make everything worse. Sure, sometimes things don’t work out, but sometimes it’s just a really hard day in an extremely long week in the middle of the worst pandemic since you’ve been alive.
No marriages were harmed in the making of this post.
