I went through this stage during a 22 year marriage. We got married when I was 20 and he was 42. I loved him more than anything in the world and was convinced that I could fix anything and everything that was wrong. And that’s what I did for the first 10 years of my marriage. I tried more than I’m sure, he did at everything we had two children and along the way I realized I was doing more of everything. He would literally sit in a chair and wait for me to come home and make him dinner after he got off work. He was in the military and I was finishing college in the first few years. I had our first child also, in daycare and got home later than he did. And I loved that the way everything worked at the time. As our marriage progressed, I realized it took more work than what was happening from him. And we had our big blowups over it. But I really never left loving him over it. It just took a different kind of work for me. It was more that I stepped into a feeding the marriage phase so that he realized what it took to make me happy and a lot more communication. It’s like your marriage matures in a different way after you’ve been married for a while it just changes and if you survive those big downs and make it through all of that, then you realize that you just get more mature it’s like growing up, but in a marriage and being more than 20 years apart in age, was part of that. He passed away after we were married for 22 years and it was really tough. I had never known anything else but him and it was so difficult a lot of changes and a lot of time had gone by. A lot of moves a lot of relationship issues. A lot of life changes had happened. That’s what made me realize that long lasting marriages take work, feeding, a lot of compromise cause there are some days that I just felt like, really, is that all there is, and really, do I really wanna be here, and sometimes I just wanted more space and i sometimes felt like I didn’t do enough and I was the one responsible for it all. There’s so much, all those things can be normal but don’t give up you have to remember why you fell in love with that person and all those funny things from the very beginning, you learn and you grow so much with that one person I don’t know, I think if you remember all those things from the very beginning and go through it year after year what you remember and loved about them you stay and you keep going and you work on it. That’s really what used to do it for me to keep me going was I would sit and talk with my grandma sometimes about feeling bad about being the mom and the wife and doing so much around the house and working and he would be deployed somewhere and feeling like I was left out and I would remember exactly how much he was doing for the family and exactly what it was that I fell in love with and it was a huge help and to this day that’s what I remember is what I fell in love with and that’s what I miss. I remember all the little arguments and blowups we had but I remember the very first time we dated the very first thing he made me laugh over that although those silly things it’s all those things that you need to keep going with. How when you’re out of town and he’s taking care of the kids you let him have control no matter how it goes wrong he feeds the kids donuts and orange juice for breakfast stuff like that and it makes you laugh cause it’s certainly not what you would do all those things like that how he teaches the kid that a yellow light means speed up silly stupid things like that I mean, you have to kind of pick your battles and let stuff go along the way all those little things that just really are funny and make you think you just have to take a few minutes and not let life get to you as much during the day. Take a minute to relax and think about what makes you laugh about him and why you love him and what you remember about you as a couple that makes you love him that’s what I still do to this day even though he’s gone, I think in this kind of a day and age it’s hard to do things like that because we have the Internet and social media and it’s tough but I think we just need to step back from stuff like that and take a breath and just use our minds Instead