Relationships take work.  

Probably not the kind of thing you want to hear with Valentine’s Day just a few days away but it’s true.

I am saying this because on the outside, people might think that my husband and I have the perfect relationship, but we really don’t. We have been through some things that have really tested our couple metal. There is so much I could share about our journey and the lessons we learned (and I will in future posts) but here is just a little snippet of our love story.

High school sweethearts…

My husband and I are high school sweethearts. He was my very first boyfriend and I was his very first girlfriend. He claims that he stalked me from the first time he saw me at orientation but I was oblivious.  We became friends and realised that we lived very close to each other so we started travelling home together after school every day. He would call me from his part-time job and I didn’t think anything of it because he had free calls (yes kids, this was pre-texting). Some of the calls were so long that I would run out of things to say and it would have uncomfortable silences, so I was pretty sure he wasn’t interested. But ahhh, my awkward charm.

The night he confessed his affection on the phone, I was shocked into silence. When I found my voice, I asked to just be friends. But something happened right after…I started to see him differently. A few months later, on another phone call, I confessed that I started having feelings too. We had our usual awkward silence and then he said, “Sooo I like you and you like me…” We have been together ever since.

Naïve beginnings…

We have known each other for almost sixteen years, been together for almost fourteen years and have been married for almost seven years. I still am unsure if to say that we were truly “together” for the first couple years because my parents objected strongly to me having a relationship when I was starting university (for more reasons that I can elaborate on in this post) so we had to find creative ways to see each other.  We somehow managed to get permission to go to our graduation ball together. Technically it was our first date…chaperoned by my mom. Sigh. Yep. She thankfully tried to stay out of our way as much as possible but it was embarrassing nonetheless.

Fourteen years is a looooong time. You would think we know EVERYTHING about each other by now. And in a way we do, but life is dynamic and so are we, so we sometimes learn new things about each other and ourselves from time to time. We are very different people from when we met, yet still the same in a weird way. I always joke that when we first got together, we were both very naïve.

We wanted to get married right away, in fact we were engaged just two years into our relationship. We would have been just 20 and 21 at the time I believe. I would be thinking like this, “we don’t need money, we can fill our car up with loooove”.  Yeah, you can roll your eyes, “present me” does that to “past me” all the time. Mind you, we were using public transportation everywhere at that point.

Reality later hit us that love was not the only thing you needed in a relationship. You needed a plan, you needed stability. It was a challenging lesson to learn, it even reached a point where we almost broke up over it. It took a lot of maturing, a lot of talking and even a near death experience to remind us that we wanted to be together.

Love and Marriage…

We were engaged for five years. We struggled a lot during this time – emotionally, financially, spiritually…in every way you could think. When we finally got married, we were in a good place, a freeing place, an exciting place.

But marriage was a whole different ball game. It is wonderful but it comes with its own unique challenges. Marriage was an eye-opener for us. It brings out your best sides and your worst sides if I’m really honest, but that is when you truly see if you meant what you said when you were reciting your vows – “for better or for worse…”

Marriage makes you realise just how much baggage you have but the great thing is that you try to deal with it together. It became clear as day how differently we were raised, how differently we dealt with situations, and that we had expectations that we didn’t even know we had – both of each other and ourselves. It was almost as though we needed to relearn each other. The two people who were fighting to be together for almost seven years were now together – all day, every day (mostly). This was new territory.

It really helps when you marry your best friend because you can eventually laugh at the time you freaked out when you realised that you had no forks in the kitchen or when a miscommunication resulted in you making chow mein and baked beans only for dinner because you thought maybe that was a weird meal your husband grew up on (He thought I would understand he didn’t mean those two items only but I like to go with exactly what someone says).

Then comes a baby…

Fast forward almost seven years later and we have an almost one-year-old. We always joked that if we had started when we first got together, we could have had an almost 14-year-old by now. But everything happens at the right time.

Becoming parents was one of the most beautiful and one of the most testing times for us. We had to adapt from a life full of mornings sleeping in, date nights whenever we wanted and focusing on each other most of the times, to having a tiny human who invades our bed (we like the cuddles though), who dictates our schedule and who gets most, if not all, of the attention.

It took us about six months after her arrival to really get accustomed to our new normal, a place where we try our best to make sure that not only our baby girl is doing okay but that the other is okay too. It gets so easy to get caught up and to take your mate for granted.  But it is important to become aware when that is happening and take the steps to reconnect.

Perspective…

At every step of the way, we have had different struggles and different lessons to learn. Everything we have and everything that we are now came with a lot of work, a lot of communication and a lot of loving each other past our flaws. I have a tendency to dwell on the bad times and the mistakes we made, almost to a point where I almost forget about the good times.

Just maybe a week or two ago, my husband did a chart and sent to me…

He really made me smile with this one. It may seem so silly but it means so much.

If you continuously work on your relationship and choose your mate every day, then you will get through the bad times. Those times just make you appreciate the good times even more. No person is perfect and therefore no relationship is perfect. As a matter of fact, expect imperfect love. But know when you have a good thing and work hard to keep it, work hard to evolve together, work hard to love each other beyond the imperfections.

You come to love not by finding the perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly…

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