Relationships

Sometimes I feel like Himself and I have gone back to the beginning of our relationship again. We're relearning each other's limits, personalities, and how the other feels about things. Four years ago something happened that caused a huge rift in our lives and it's taken its toll on us. We've been married for 12 years and have had to go back to the start to work things out. There's been a lot of pain shared between us and we've finally gotten to the point where things are starting to balance out again.

A marriage is a partnership, one that has to be an even balance between the two roles for it to work. Notice I didn't say equal. There are going to be things that one does better than the other. What needs to be figured out is how to work within those limits. A newlywed couple starts out with a preset notion of how things are going to be. As a relationship matures and grows, that balance is going to have to be restructured again and again as new knowledge and skills are gained.

A long term relationship like what my parents had before my mom died (45 years, I think), a lot of compromises had to have been reached. Learning to compromise is one of the hardest things in the world, especially when both partners think they are the ones in the right. There will be arguments, harsh words, hurt feelings. But the whole point of the thing is to keep going and not give up. It's when people give up on talking to each other that things can fall apart.

I'm not trying to tell anyone how to run their relationships. I'm definitely the last person you want to ask, given the kind of examples of marriages/families I've had in my life. I'm fighting to sort my own marriage out right now. I can share what I've noticed through trial, tribulation, and pure observation. Your experiences are different from mine, so you may see something different that I don't. We are, after all, the sum of our experiences.