Marriage Mondays

I'm going to start a new series of posts, "Marriage Mondays" and hopefully I can get a post done every week.  I'm going to write about marriage obviously... mostly about what works for my husband and I and what not to do. There are two main reasons why I've decided to do this.  I'm not trying to sound arrogant but several people in the last few months have made comments to me about how great my marriage is, or how well Hubs and I work together, or how happy we are.  Granted, we have our slumps just like any normal couple but I want to share with other people what we do to try and keep our marriage the best that it can be.  The second reason I want to start this series is because we have seen couples splitting up all around us.  Many of our friends are getting divorced and given the high divorce rate in this country, I'm sure it's not just our friends that are doing the divorcing.  Divorce is everywhere.  If I can help even one couple stay together, then this blog will have done something good and I will be happy.

Before I start the series, I'd like to give a little history of my husband and I so you can get to know me a little better and see the 'history' behind some of my forthcoming ideas.
Hubs is not my first husband.  I myself have been through the "Big D".  I got married shortly after high school to someone that just wasn't right for me.  We fought a lot, had different life goals, were at different maturity levels; it just wasn't good.  Despite all that, I wanted to stay with him but I think we had inflicted too much pain on each other and there was no going back.  He asked me for a divorce about 2 years after we had gotten married and I reluctantly accepted.  There was no way I was going to change his mind... which I learned after several attempts.  While I was devastated, I learned a lot about what NOT to do from that marriage.  After we divorced, I saw so clearly what I could have done differently.  Amazing how that happens.... everything is so clear when you pull yourself out of a situation.

Hubs and I met in early 2005, started dating in June of that year and were married in November.  I started dating him because I wanted to just have fun and not have a serious relationship.  I NEVER would have believed you if you told me I would end up married to him.  Little did I know that 5 months later we would be in Lake Tahoe in someone's spare bedroom that they'd made into a "chapel", wearing blue jeans, saying the big "I do."  (Classy, right?)

After we had been married for about 3 1/2 years, we went through a slump.  It felt like we were roommates that slept together.  There was no connection.  We were bored.  Everything was mechanical.  "Bye, I love you."  "Goodnight, I love you."  All the obligatory phrases were said at the obligatory times and that was it.  Robots, that's what we were.  We decided to get a divorce.  We even made out financial plans to split, figured out who would have the kids, decided on child support; it was a done deal.  But neither of us really wanted it.  One night I sat down and said, "Look, I don't know if I want to get divorced.  We got married.  We made a commitment.  We need to decide what we are going to do."  Hubs said we should try to make our marriage work.  I told him, we aren't going to TRY.  We are either all in, or not in at all.  We are either going to do whatever it takes to make this marriage work, TOGETHER, or we are screwed.  We decided to work it out, pour ourselves into our marriage, and stick together, and it has been great.  That was the turning point in our marriage.  Maybe we needed to know we were both really IN it.  Maybe we just needed a wake-up call.  I don't know what it was but after that, we really changed.  Now we have a better marriage than I could have ever hoped for.  We are raising three great kids together, we never fight (although we never really did before either), and we even made it through 14 months of separation due to my job with no hiccups whatsoever.

We are real people.  We are busy people.  We both work.  We disagree sometimes.  We go through a slump here and there.  But we make our marriage a priority and don't allow those things to break us apart.  You can do it too.

See you Monday!

This is us on our 'classy' wedding night almost 7 years ago.  We spent most of the evening in a casino and didn't even tell the people we were with that we had eloped before meeting up with them.