Straight talk

My husband, in a trying situation with the kids, can turn things around and make them funny. I cannot.

I can remember the garbage, the recycling, show and tell and what to pick up for dinner. My husband cannot.

We all have our strengths. And we all have our weaknesses. If we’re lucky, we meet someone in this life who helps to balance everything out. I remember to pay the bills, he gets up umpteen times a night to tend to a screaming 2 year old.

No relationship is perfect. Everyone has their highs and lows and I refuse to believe otherwise. So while my husband and I may fight from time to time, and get annoyed with each other perhaps a little more frequently than that, we know that we’re there for each other. The love is never missing. Never doubted. But also never taken for granted.

I remember when I was much younger, my mother offered me some practical relationship advice.

She said, “When you think you’ve found that someone, don’t ask yourself if you can see yourself married to him forever. You don’t know what the future holds. Things change. People change. You ask yourself if you want that man to be the father of your child. Because that’s something that will never change.”

My sister had some similar, yet very different advice: “He doesn’t have to be Mr. Right. Just so long as he’s not Mr. Wrong.”

So while both bits of wisdom made perfect sense, they kind of lacked the whole romantic angle, no? But here’s the thing – my sister has been happily married for over 20 years, and my parents for over 50.

As my own marriage nears the 8 year mark, I reflect on those words and realize they’re not cynical. Or unromantic. They’re just true. Here I am, always talking about transparency and telling it like it is, how no one ever does, yet my own sister and mother – my family – were talking straight to me all this time.

Huh.

And in the same way that my bitching about my kids in no way detracts from the insane amount of love I have for them, my family stressing a practical approach to marriage in no way detracts from the possibility of romance. It’s all about the angle.

8 years.

Just a drop in the bucket for a lot of you out there, I imagine, but tack on the 5 years we were together before that and it’s a good chunk of my life.

And he still watches me out of the corner of his eye when I cross or uncross my legs on the ottoman. And I can still feel the fire singe through my veins every time his fingertips so much as accidentally brush my skin.

Yes, at times we want to kill each other. But those times pale in comparison to the frequency with which we realize we’re in this together. That we’re a team.

And it’s a good team.