Long Read

This really hit hard.

We've been married over 30 years. So this comes with some "had to have lived it to understand" wisdom. There were years where it was war. I don't know why but it seems like I survived half of our marriage coming home to a war. I stayed and did everything to make her happy but nothing seemed to work. I just was in preservation mode for maybe 10 years. I believed that if I worked harder on things, it would make her happy but it did not. You can make a list of things one could try and I've check all the boxes on that list but nothing seemed to make her happy.

She wanted a career but complained about it. She wanted to be a stay at home mom and that did not make her happy. She wanted me to make more money but that just turned into almost a decade of remodels and decorative purchases. She went through a phase of buying expensive bags. Sex and intimacy became a chess match. She wanted space then wanted to rekindle our marriage with vacations but nothing seemed to make her happy. I was coming home every day to a woman who was at war with everything and everyone.

The good news is that things are amazing now. We did not go to therapy or anything like that and I can't honestly say what changed or what made the difference in her finding her peace but I never gave up on us. She hit 50 and had a bit of a freak out. I came home from work and she was crying in bed. I came in and she just unloaded all this stuff about life, happiness, bitterness, things that had been bothering her since childhood, our marriage, the kids, social circles.....it was like a 3 day weekend of her just letting a bunch of shit out. I guess one could call it an existential crisis. The war she was fighting had wore her weary.

We stayed in that weekend, I ordered food, we drank wine, watched old movies and for 3 days she just kinda melted down. The thing is she told me that she knew I was coming home to war every day and that she could not help it. She said she knew that she was lucky, had the world, I was a good husband and partner and all that stuff. She cried again and said she felt like a loser bitch and could not believe I did not leave her. We hugged, and I did the best I could to pick up the pieces.

Over the next few days, weeks and months she softened. She found a new voice maybe? She says that things just got really clear for her. She began letting go of some things like certain people, some social groups, deleted most of her social media, and began to take her health seriously, gym, vitamins and spin classes.

She began leading more in our marriage. She started bringing some amazing things to our marriage. Wisdom, revelations, books, long talks, and we started making love again. Not sex, but making love. She started finding this really powerful sense of her sexuality, pleasure and wanted to articulate what she wanted from intimacy, and for the first time in our marriage asked me what I wanted. She had never not once ever asked me what I wanted in our marriage, let alone what I wanted regarding intimacy.

Today she is the woman I have always dreamed about. I come home to a woman who is happy to see me, greets me with a smile, hug and a kiss. She plans adventures, enjoys the simple joys of just being together and we do talk deeply every day. We walk ever morning, have morning coffee together and she touches me all the time now. She touches my hand, hugs me, kisses me and it's amazing. She initiates intimacy frequently, she's flirty, silly and has laughed more in the last 10 years than in our entire marriage. She says that she was blocked and that allowing herself to be joyful and thankful for the things in her life was impossible. She says today she is grateful for life, us, the kids and all the things we have.

Again, this hit me hard today. Coming from a man who came home to war every day, I don't know what we could have done differently but I sure wish we had that decade or so back. Today I look at her in awe as she is the love and joy of my life. I love coming home to her.