A Lifelong Investment

"There are god days and there are bad days, and this is one of them." --Lawrence Welk

A marriage will decompose over time if left untended, breaking down to nothing more than skeletal remains. This dissolving usually starts harmless enough, when the rote routines of daily life get in the way. We become so caught up in those routines that we forget to set aside time for the people we should be investing in, paying attention to, and being actively engaged with. I've known many couples over the years who've split up, in part, because they didn't give one another enough attention. This is especially problematic for military relationships because they also have the added stress of frequent deployments and/or working extremely long hours.

In August, my husband and I will be married twenty-seven years. The fact that we've lasted this long after making so many mistakes is not what amazes me. What amazes me is that through all of the good, the bad, and the seriously ugly, he is still my best friend. He is the first person I want to tell when something amazing or something horrible happens to me. He is one of the few people on this planet who by just looking at me can tell if I need to talk, or if I'm about to cry, or if I'm curling up inside of myself for my own protection because I'm feeling threatened. He will also call me on my shit in a way that is tender but insistent. And while we've had some wicked fights over the years, not once has he ever been intentionally cruel or used verbal weapons, i.e. my mistakes or shortcomings, to attack me. He is not the kind of man who tears someone else down because he's angry or wants to make a point. Considering how nightmarish my childhood frequently was, this is something about his character that I value tremendously.

He had a very "Leave It To Beaver" childhood and because of that I know it has been a challenge for him to deal with my insecurities and abandonment issues and there have been several times along the way that I thought we'd never be able to overcome the mess we kept making of our relationship year after year. How do you overcome the fact that you are from such different worlds that it's nearly impossible to relate to one another? How do you fix things that you have respectively broken so badly that you don't even recognize what they were supposed to look like? For us, you lay all the cards on the table, you each speak your respective truths, and you learn how to really listen. It is only from that place of raw, wide-open honesty that you can begin to build a bond so strong that it holds up under any of the pressures life has to throw at it.

I don't lie to my husband even when telling him the truth is very difficult.  If I felt like I had to lie to him, it would mean that I didn't trust him with my truths and we couldn't have come this far if that was the case. I need a place where I feel safe enough that I can be myself, all of myself, and not be afraid that I will be attacked for who I am. He has learned how to provide that safe harbour and the fact that he loves me enough to do so means more to me than I have the words to express. Thankfully, I don't have to because he knows.

The other night, as he and I sat under the stars and enjoyed the spring breeze while we decompressed, we talked about the events of the last three years and the mistakes made over the last three decades. Both of us are adept at beating ourselves up in regards to our mistakes and I commented to him that if I were a better woman, I wouldn't have made some of those bad choices. He looked at me and said, "Well, baby, we can't all be Jesus!" And when I said I wasn't very good at determining people I should trust and people I shouldn't, he said, "A wise woman has frequently told me that when someone is of value to you, you invest in them and your actions reflect that sentiment."

Many people have commented over the years about how lucky I am to have found the kind of relationship I have with my Salty Bones man and from the outside maybe it looks almost perfect. I just smile at them and say, "Thank you," but I know that luck had nothing to do with how he and I got here. Together, we built what we have, often painstakingly, piece by piece, gluing back on the broken ones when they fell off. It was stubbornness, determination, and a whole lot of rolling around in some pretty awful muck that got us to this place we're in now. Every night I've been reading my posts to my husband and his comment about this one was, "Baby, I'll roll around in the muck with you anytime!"

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