Contributed by Nadia Persun, PhD
Your marriage is far from perfect. It’s a work in progress, a path seeded with joy and mistakes. But it’s the only chance to try to create more good memories than bad, more joy than grief, and to preserve some enduring sense of happiness along the way. It is a process with no final destination but small victories and moments of closure. You try hard, you take it seriously, but often fail.
You are not expressing things right to your spouse, mostly because you barely understand them yourself. Other times you are talking out of stress and fear. Your spouse does the same and for the same reasons. Trying to talk it out, you both say too much, too loud. Then you can’t hear each other, talking over each other, busy arguing about who is right. You fight about respect, fairness and appreciation, shouting so loudly that it hurts your eardrums, often using one sided and self serving arguments. Answers and solutions drown in the excess of words and volume. Common sense leaves the room, as emotions spill over the space in vanity.
There will be more arguments and painful conversations that go past midnight. But there will also be love confessions where you say or hear something important and defining that gives hope and helps sort it all out. There will also be kisses and embraces that make your heart race and speechless moments of genuine connection that bring tears to your eyes. That wicked cycle of raw constructive and destructive emotions, the mix of passion of a bipolar nature, keeps it all going, helps put things in perspective and reject a possibility of separation even at the hardest times. Exhausted, you may even question if it’s worth it. But then you sleep on it, and wake up in the morning with a new hope and a feeling in your heart: there is still work to be done, happiness to be had, arguments to be created and resolved, for better or worse, together.
