About Marriage and Honesty

If there is anything I have learned in the last year of following along the lives of some of my favorite bloggers, it's that the best way to ensure your blog is successful is to be honest.

I think nearly all of my favorite blogs (this one, that one and the one over there) have posted at some point or the other about the difficult task of being honest and sharing some very personal and sometimes private feelings. And thoughts. And emotions.

So here goes.

I am a married woman. I like to think that all other married women experience the same things: the growing pains of learning to live along side this strange, new creature -- your husband.

There are times when I laugh at the things he does, times when we laugh together even. There are times that I am frustrated with what feels like an inability to communicate what I feel. There are times when we learn something together, about the other, and it's all beautiful and Hallmark-y and this-is-what-it's-all-about-y. And then there are times when I have this overwhelming, all consuming feeling that from the outside, my marriage has to be perfect.

I think that all married women feel that at some level at some point in their married lives. I would hazard to say that it falls somewhere after the "honeymooning" and  your 20 year high school reunion. Or maybe it's when you have kids and everything changes. I don't know. I'm just guessing.

At any rate, as likely every married woman feels, I feel like it's especially true for me. Mostly because I met my husband on July 29th, 2011. It's now July 20th, 2012 and we've been married long enough to have grown a baby. You do the math.

So I guess know what it is for me. It's that I am shouldering the load of what I think everyone else is thinking. It's a dangerous and slippery slope, lemme tell ya!

But even knowing that I don't know what everyone else is thinking, that I'm just assuming that's what everyone is thinking, doesn't stop the overwhelming desire to shed some serious crocodile tears out of frustration or exhaustion or just plain 'ol disappointment. I think what's worse, though, is that I feel like I can't tell anyone when things are not-so-sunny because I feel like my marriage has to be be perfect and that no one must know about the times -- which let's face it, there are a lot of little times -- when we are not perfect.

Or maybe it's the fact that I had someone really close to me call me up and spit venom at me for the better part of a half hour with particular emphasis on my serious lack of judgement in "rushing" in to this marriage. And a minor amount of emphasis on the fact that she was the only one that cared about me enough to be honest with me about it all.

Whatever it is, I seriously need to get over it 'cause my marriage isn't perfect. And it probably never will. And worst of all? Trying to gloss over that fact is exhausting.



LC