Surviving 7 years of Marriage

On 12^th May 2019, my husband and I celebrated 7 years of marriage and 14 years of being in a relationship.

The number 7 has always been a special number for us, we got married on exactly 7 years of being together. Biblically, seven is the number of completeness and perfection.

But I cannot help but reflect on the fact that 7 years later, things are far from perfect. Also, the last year was one of the most challenging times in our relationship. This says a lot because we have been through many, many challenging periods in our 14 years.

Marriage was an eye-opener for me.👀

After being together for as long as we were, you would think that nothing would come as a surprise and that you would have known each other pretty well, right?

Wrong. 😕

Read about the evolution of our love here.

What the fork?

That was our first lesson. From the get-go, we realised just how much our upbringing influenced our thinking and habits.

Let’s just say, our families are very different.

A simple thing of us having no forks freaked me out. Yep, my husband moved into the home I had grown up in, a home where spoons were the dominant utensil for eating. He came from a family of eaters who preferred to fork (pardon my French). So when I realised that I brought him to an almost fork-less house, you can imagine my dismay as a newlywed. I had a teeny-tiny bit of an emotional breakdown, during which my husband calmly proposed a solution – let’s go out and buy some forks.

But what is now a funny anecdote of the start of our marriage revealed to us that we dealt with problems very differently.

Learning About Yourself

Marriage helps you to not only learn about your partner, but learn a lot about yourself. Any long-term relationship would do this. But there is something about living in the same space with your beau and realising that you have committed “till death do you part”. It can either bring out the best or the worst in you at different times.

I thought I was a pretty patient person before marriage…turns out, I am really not. Not just with my husband at times, but more so with myself. I wanted to have everything perfect right away – be a perfect wife, have a perfect home, live a perfect life. But that doesn’t come as soon as you say I do. You are hit with reality the day you come back from your honeymoon.

This is something entirely new. You can’t achieve perfection in a day.

We would soon realise there would never be perfection in our relationship. And that’s okay…

Expectations vs Reality

But it doesn’t make the transition any easier…

You also quickly realise that you both had certain expectations that don’t always pan out…

Even though I considered myself a “modern-day” woman, I realised that I did adopt some of the more traditional concepts of what a wife should be from my parents and grandparents. If you cooked, cleaned and (ahem) canoodled very often, you could keep your husband happy.  

Not only is that view really, really wrong but it is so far from reality, it ain’t funny (except maybe the canoodling part. Tee hee.) 😜

My mom-in-law had thankfully raised a son who knew how to cook and clean for himself. He is actually much better at it than I am. Okay, my cooking is awesome eh, I just don’t love to do it the way he does. I mainly like to eat.

So in that sense, the reality was much better than the expectation, though there were many times when I felt like an inadequate wife when I compared myself to other wives.😟

I had to remind myself that our situation was different and that we had to do what worked for us. And if that meant he would do the cooking and cleaning, then doggone it, I won’t fight it!

Tee hee, just kidding, we try to share responsibilities where necessary. Gosh but I do hate ironing. Blech.😣

Blending Blunder

A funny “expectation vs reality” story for us has to be when I tried making callaloo for the first time. I really don’t know why I didn’t look at a recipe. I mean, my mom and grandma made it countless times, surely I could too. You put the ingredients together and boil right? How hard could it be?

Not hard at all…once you follow the steps in order.

I wasn’t quite sure how people got their “callaloo” so smooth, I figure they blended it. I was correct. What I was wrong about was at which point they blended it.

So after washing the dasheenbush bhaaghi, I threw it all in the blender.

My husband came home to the pungent aroma of what he thought was a “bess” callaloo. What he met was his wife in the kitchen looking at the blended goop, wondering why it looked so wrong. 🤔

He asked, “You blended it before you cooked it?” I could tell he was stifling laughter as the realization dawned on me – you had to cook it first. Sigh.

I tried to salvage it but it looked like the scene in Gremlins when one of the green gremlins got blended.

One pot of callaloo – nope.

One dasheenbush smoothie – check!

Excess Baggage

I don’t think either of us realised just how much baggage we really had when we got married.

Like dang, it feels almost like every time you think you dealt with a piece of baggage, another one would come out of the woodwork. Each phase of our lives revealed a new piece, so much so that I considered renting a storage unit.

It was like each new struggle gave you an epiphany of the trauma you experienced at different stages of your life.

I mean it was everything from daddy issues to the fear of failure to abandonment issues to spirituality struggles. I could delve deeper into each thing and come up with 10 more posts on 10 different issues between the two of us (It’s probably more but I said 10 to make me feel better).

This made us realise that you really are a sum-total of your experiences.

It is crucial to let those experiences make you a stronger, more empathetic person. I have realised that every single struggle we have been through has helped us help others who are struggling through the same thing.

And it’s not that misery loves company, but there is something very beautiful about knowing that you are not alone and being reassured that you can get through something.

Commitment and Communication

But before you can help anyone else, you have to commit to each other and to your relationship. I am not gonna lie, there are several times when I think it is so much easier to just throw in the towel. Get out before it gets more complicated. Then you realise, it is too late for that…

You love this person. You just didn’t realise that it was a bit conditional.

I expected a lot from my husband. I had expectations I didn’t even voice to myself.

But that wasn’t fair. I was putting something on him that he didn’t even know he had to live up to.

In the same way, he took some things for granted, even admitted getting married selfishly and not dealing with all the baggage he had had. He just wanted to spend his life with me.

I understood because a part of me got married thinking that it would make everything right in the world.

We were fairly young and have grown so much since then.

I don’t know if we could ever finish dealing with all the baggage, even any new baggage we pick up along the journey, but one thing we are certain of – we have to commit and communicate.

Achy, Breaky, Communicate-y

Our communication was a bit shaky in the beginning though. I remember preparing to make dinner for him one day and I asked him what he wanted. We were texting, a medium I especially like because I feel like you can get and give clear messages and plus, you gots them receipts! 😏

Anyway, he casually texted, “chow mein and baked beans”. Yep, it sounded strange to me too. I think I may have even asked if he was sure and he said yes. I resolved that perhaps his mom used to make that meal and he was feeling nostalgic, so I proceeded to make chow mein and baked beans…ONLY. 😐

The look on his face when I presented the plate is etched into my memory forever.

Apparently when he said “chow mein and baked beans”, he also meant “and well the usual other things like fried rice and chicken”, but didn’t ACTUALLY type this to his detail-oriented, needs-specific-instructions-to-ensure-she-does-the-right-thing-because-she-has-a-fear-of-failure wife.

Needless to say, I considered that one of our first married fights. (This really just means that I got mad and emotional, and he tried to calm me down).

Since then, we really tried our best to communicate as best as we could. We have faltered a lot in this area but have never stopped trying.

We have long conversations at least once a week now about so many things – the way we interpreted something, they way we felt hurt about something (it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it, am I right ladies?), the way something in our past has made us the way we are or aren’t now…the list is never-ending.

But it is SO important. You need to talk till you both are blue in the face.

You can never TRULY know how a person feels or thinks until you ASK them.

And prepare for some truth bombs (truth be told, my husband handles those way better than me, but I am much better now…most times) but you have to remember that your mate is your partner and not your enemy. That is THE MOST important thing to remember because it is real easy to get defensive up in this place!

Just talk. Even you get emotional at first (ahem, me again) – take a time out, collect your thoughts and then try again. The revelations are freeing I tell you. It is what takes you from that conditional love to that unconditional love.

See the DEEPLY-flawed person before you and acknowledge that you are DEEPLY-flawed too and love each other in spite of it all. 💕

It ain’t easy people, you will have some ROUGH times but if you truly love each other and are willing to do the work, the results can be rewarding, not just for the other person but for yourself.

More to Say

There is so much more I could say on this topic but I will in future posts. I am pretty sure we will have other life lessons and epiphanies to share about love and marriage so stay tuned…

This love story ain’t over yet…

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe if you would like more posts from the Mind of Yash that would motivate you or make you laugh!