There was a point in my marriage years ago where I felt like I couldn’t hang on another minute. He had changed, (I’m sure I had too) and our marriage was in utter chaos. I even sat down and began looking for divorce lawyers and contemplated packing up and leaving numerous times. Our every conversation became heated and contentious, there was no peace in our home, no reprieve from the anger we were both drowning in. At the height of this, I suffered a miscarriage and began to withdraw from my husband even more.
It’s funny how a relationship can change. You start out happier than you’ve ever been, and slowly over time, the more selfishness creeps in, it starts to destroy what was once your happiest state of being. I used to sit and contemplate how we got from point A to point B, wondering if we could ever go back, or if we even wanted to. There had been many things that had already occurred in our relationship leading up to this point, and baggage that had scarred us from even before we met.
We had young kids at the time this all came to a head and I felt ahuge lack of support. He wasn’t leading our home like I thought he should, and our marriage wasn’t what I had envisioned having. This led me to contemplate a lot of choices I had made previously and wishing I had chosen different. I began to go down a path of extreme dissatisfaction and I began to become bitter that he hadn’t turned out to be what I had hoped he would be initially. The more I expressed this, the angrier it made him, he felt beaten down, unloved, and disrespected. In our fighting, words were thrown around loosely and carelessly, words that couldn’t be taken back and cut deeply. Perhaps, I had set the bar a little too high and had placed the idea of him on a pedestal that couldn’t be reached, and he felt he could never live up to my glorified standard. Looking back now, I think I was suffering from my past trauma and was unknowingly sabotaging my life in a way.
I found myself clinging to a thread of the end of my rope, so to speak. Looking into our future, the amount of work we would need to put into our relationship was daunting to say the least. I would continually think, “wouldn’t it just be easier to walk away and start fresh?” The truth is, if you hang on long enough you will find strength you never knew you had. Facing the hardest trials of your life can sometimes feel like walking through fire; though you are burned, you come out on the other side more refined. Beauty comes from the ashes.
Eventually, we had to make a change, we were both tired of being miserable and somehow miraculously came to that conclusion around the same time. We decided together that divorce and destroying our family would not be an option for us, we would not let the past define our future and we were going to fight like hell to save our marriage.
If this is you, I know you are hurting, I know you think you can’t hang on another minute. Don’t allow your issues to overcome your marriage, whatever they may be. When you feel you are at the end of that rope, tie a knot and hang on. With time and perseverance, that commitment will be honored if you can both throw selfishness to the wayside. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and I don’t promise it will be easy, but I can promise it will be worth it. You and your husband are together for a reason, there are always going to be obstacles, and you are meant to conquer them together.