Now that I have a moment to myself... lots of similarities amongst us men. First...
- Gary and Joe, you have wonderful wives (I know the Queen first hand, and from everything I've heard about Mrs Miller, she is indeed your better half
). Consider yourselves blessed - I know you do, so that's redundant.
- Stads... that was a terrific read.
- Professor... mad props to you. You and your wife are incredible people based on what you've told.
Now on to the jingle.marriage.
<holy shit this ended up being quite the dissertation!
tl;dr... had a lot of ups and downs, but with a lot of patience and work, things are great now - make sure you take care of yourself first>
19 years in a couple of weeks, and as most of you know, two wonderful jingle.kids (b/g twins). By no means has it been an easy road. We met when I was 25 just after university, married at 27, kids at 29. Mrs.jingle is 10 months older than I. We fell in love because we both filled a void in each others' life at the time. It was terrific, but the marriage has been hard work. Physiologically, marriage will always be harder than the courtship process... the chemicals in our brains just make it that way - we don't always have the "in love" triggers in our brain firing. We've had our ups and downs (a lot of downs) in our marriage, and I ended up doing a lot of reading and research on it.
We both have mental health challenges - me with depression, her with anxiety and (imo, undiagnosed) borderline personality disorder - she doesn't self harm, carries many of the other traits. We also both carry a lot of issues/baggage from our childhood. This has been the cause and triggers of much of our depression/anxiety, which leads to the 'downs'. mrs.jingle was also a stay-at-home mom (we were fortunate enough that my income afforded us this), which as a mother and for our kids was an absolutely amazing thing to be able to do. As a woman/individual/wife .. it posed a lot of challenges for her - isolating, lacking her sense of 'self' (which triggered a lot of other issues). We fought... a lot - which is a primary trigger for my depression. It was quite the shampoo cycle (wash-rinse-repeat). For many years, I wasn't sure we would make it ... and I there were times I wasn't sure I wanted us to make it. But, I was a product of divorce (at 14 years old), and I would never have allowed that to happen.
I vividly remember a post Tick made a number of years ago about how he had been through some rough patches, but came out of it and now (ie, then... and hopefully still now
) his marriage was as good or better than it ever was. I remember thinking - 'god I hope that's me/mrs.jingle' ... but seriously doubted it. The good news is, I/we did get thru the rough parts. Over the past 4 years, as the kids (who thankfully are amazing and - for the most part - problem free teenagers) got into and thru their teenage years, she found a purpose and passion in her life outside of the family - and that's a good thing. Prior to that, she defined herself as a "mother" and a "wife". Meaning if she didn't feel valued by her kids and husband, she was a wreck. In that regard, anytime I wasn't spending with her, or attention I was giving to ANYTHING else in life was (to her) internalized as me not valuing her, and not wanting to be with her - all functions of her mental health issues, and baggage (lots of worthiness issues). As such, I had very little in my life that was 'mine' for many many years - the odd concert here and there, but that was about it. Now that she has found her passion, she isn't so reliant on me/kids for her happiness, which has allowed me to do the things that are 'mine' that make me happy. Don't get me wrong, it's not like we live totally separate lives, but we're very comfortable in our ability to do certain things apart from one another. For many many years, this wasn't the case for mrs.jingle.
Basically, this is a long-assed and personal way of saying it's incredibly important not to lose yourself in any relationship. Don't sacrifice everything to please the other; maintain your interests and what is truly important to you. As Joe said, some compromises are necessary, and it feels good to do things that make your partner happy - at least it should... if it doesn't then you've probably got the wrong partner. I rambled on about this because I believe it is a critical element to a successful marriage. That guy that Barto referenced in his story who completely gave up what he was interested in for his woman ... not right, and probably not the path to a successful relationship.
There's lots of other comments that have been made that I agree whole-heartedly with - kids are a tremendous amount of work, but totally worth it; you get out of the relationship what you put in to it; communication is critical - HONEST communication; it's a lot of hard work - sometimes marriage/family feels more like a business than anything else.
Like lordixor, I too am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as it relates to the next phase of life which is kid-less and career-less, and thus the chance for us to just be husband and wife to and for each other. We've been pretty blessed financially, and I'm in the 10-year window until retirement - Freedom 56 baby! In the past, my fantasies about what that would look like, did not always include me still be married. Now I can't imagine that.