I have no idea how to describe our last 11.5 years of marriage. Looking back now I feel like we were still kids in some ways. Being married to someone but not being able to be vulnerable with them felt all kinds of wrong. I’m only now understanding the parts of myself I have been holding back, in my defence I didn’t know these parts existed. I didn’t exercise those parts of me, they were laying dormant. You see I believe the person I am becoming is the person I was always meant to be and I had to be all the versions of me on my way in order to get to this point. This is a unique experience for everybody there is no one size fits all to this process.

Our first 10.5 years were…let me see if I can get this right…fingers crossed! We were happily married and truly in love with a beautiful home and property but I felt an undertone of a disconnection, I could never put my finger on it. I never focused on it for too long and I certainly wouldn’t allow it to disturb our life. We had arguments and settled them, ish. Sometimes more productive than others and after each time I was left feeling like, are you shitting me, we just fought about tin foil? What the actual… never mind but I remember feeling clearly like there has to be a better way to talk than this it’s like we never quite got to the root cause. Turns out a lot of our insecurities were at play so the issue wasn’t actually the thing that happened per say more our insecurities about conversation and trust. You have to get to a point where you each trust that you will give each other the benefit of the doubt every time. That you won’t be met with judgement and reaction because no productive conversation can be had with those two things present. We have to trust that the other receives all of us and knows who we are so that when we do open up we can really let out who we are and what the true underlying deeper issue actually is.

So here we are at the 10.5 year mark my mental health is like a damn yo yo. Still amongst the whispers of co-vid I get the call on a Friday I have a nephew 6 months old that needs a home. It took me zero seconds to know what we were going to do I just knew that my husband, we’ll call him Mitch needed to come to that decision on his own without my influence. It was incredibly important to me that he felt 100 percent heard and present in this decision, even though I already knew were doing this thing. So we took the weekend and I said to Mitch, “I want you to think about this as if the situation was in reverse. Think about it like your brother has a son that needs a home and I will think about it from that same perspective.” I could feel more of what Mitch would be feeling in this situation from that perspective. He told me a while after that he didn’t need the weekend that as soon as I made that suggestion he knew 100 percent we were doing this thing.

From there we had several conversations over time but I still felt a disconnect somewhere and of course wouldn’t put my focus on it. This is going to sound incredibly cliche and I’m absolutely okay with that. Until I started on the healing road I wasn’t capable of loving myself and therefore wasn’t capable of allowing anyone to love me properly. In other words I had some shit to work on, and then we as a partnership had some shit to work on. I don’t want to speak for Mitch but I feel like it’s safe to say he didn’t have to do the deep soul work that I needed to do I would say he did his own work and then we met when we were ready and have been actively improving those areas.

Our conversations have more freedom now as we are building this trust in ourselves and each other, a new kind of trust that we didn’t even know was possible. Except that nagging little feeling wouldn’t go away. As I got more clarity about who I am and as I absorbed enough emotional maturity to know what I didn’t want in a partnership then it’s obvious what I do want. All I wanted was the ability to be completely vulnerable with this man and have that trust be so strong there isn’t a second of hesitation. Alternately I wanted him to be able to feel the same way, I wanted to be able to give that to him if that’s something he required of me. Which led to thoughts of wondering what he wants, I wonder. So in a raw moment one night where I got this incredible urge to shit or get off the pot I just asked him, ” What do you need from me to feel secure and fulfilled in this marriage.” He gave me his answer and I listened openly and from a place of understanding. I didn’t get defensive, the urges were there at times but I had done the work and I could work through it. It was his turn to ask me and I answered, he listened in the same exact way I did. It was the best conversation I ever had in my life, real, honest, feelings. We became a partnership that night in a way we hadn’t been before, I felt a deeper kind of love.

My hope for you is to wonder, get curious, and notice things. What do you need? It is not, let me repeat, IT IS NOT SELFISH TO ASK YOURSELF WHAT YOU NEED. In fact that can be the idea that ignites a flame to finding out who you are, and how to love yourself. It’s my hope that more people get inspired to dig a little deeper, do a few odd jobs and see what you find down there, you just might find everything you’ve been seeking.

To be continued…

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