Love. What is it? I spent so much of my life trying to find it. I knew my parents loved me, I was told God loved me, but I felt void throughout my teenage years and young adult life. I looked to movies to give me an ideal. I looked at people I knew and their relationships. I was always trying to find what everyone seemed to have. Why didn't I feel as happy as they seemed on the surface? The story of all of the times I tried to find "love" and failed will have to wait till another time.
I met my husband when I was 18. I was running from a life of failed attempts at filling voids, I was broken and he offered me hope of true love, what I craved. We started out in a whirlwind, I was crazy and lost, he was lost. We had a roller coaster of a relationship for 2 1/2 years until it turned into an erupting volcano. We were breaking up, getting back together, arousing jealousy and suspicion and bitterness at every turn, we couldn't figure out how to stop it. He left me with good reason, and in the heat of a passionately hateful moment we made a baby. That baby changed our lives forever, through her I found the meaning of true love and because of her I sought out to find God, who to me, is love (these are other stories). We separated for a year. Six months of which he was deployed, the other six were his choice. That statement in no way is to lay blame, it is what it is, and it was the best thing that ever could have happened. When he came back, we got married. We were happy. The past was exactly where it should be. My dream of true love had finally come true. We had two cars, and a beautiful baby, all we were missing was our picket fence, but that didn't matter, I had LOVE! Two months into our marriage, my husband was sent on another six month deployment and this is where the story leaves off at present day (just about).
Hubby came home. The honeymoon period was wonderful. We could finally put our lives back together and hit the play button on life's dvd player. Then the honeymoon period came to an end and we were left realizing that over the past year and a half, minus 2 months we had learned to live without each others company. We had found new hobbies, made new friends, learned new life lesson. Without each other. This was painful, we didn't know how to live in the same house. I didn't clean enough, he played too many videogames, and on top of it he had to work ALL the time. There was no time for rebuilding, no time to get to know each other again. I started getting really resentful but I pushed it down as deep as it would go, and thought that if I kept pushing forward, somewhere along the way something would just "click." It didn't.
After ignoring it for about two months, I was up late after putting the baby to bed, as usual. I thought of where we had come from, where we were and tried to look to the future to see where we were going. I couldn't see, all I could see is that we were far from okay, we didn't talk about important things, we had swept them all under a rug. When we did talk about anything worth while, it was about our daughter. She was our only common interest. I could not see us having a functional marriage at this point. I stayed up until he came home from work at 3 in the morning and we talked until about 5am. I told him the truth, I told him that I felt nothing, that I couldn't see us happy five years from now and that if we didn't do something, anything, soon, I wasn't sure we would make it. He was broken, as was I. He suggested counseling. I said "no." I held a resentment towards marriage counselors, I had never seen them do any good for anyone. I looked at them with contempt, they sat in their comfy chairs, with their pen and pad and said things like "how do you feel about that?" and "why not try some deep breathing?" This is another story though.
I posted a question on a forum for military wives and asked if anyone else had been through what we were going through and I needed to know what worked for them to restore their relationship. My first gleam of hope was hearing I wasn't the only one. We weren't the only couple who had spent so much time apart and didn't know each other anymore. One woman told me that her and her husband had done the "Love Dare" a book filled with forty days of dares to teach you how to save your marriage or strengthen it, if it wasn't broken. I slacked, but after another argument the feeling of emptiness returned and I commenced to buy the book and asked my husband to participate with me. He was more than willing.
In the next blog I will be starting with day one and continuing on to eleven. I did not start this blog when we started the love dare so I have making up to do. I apologize, after the next, none of the entries will be as long. I hope you enjoy.
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