Decorative Flower
Her Realm, Personal website and blog of Cole
May 02

This Just In: Marriage Doesn’t Kill You

So I’m doing my first-turned-on-the-computer routine which includes checking e-mail and going through the featured articles on AIM today (otherwise, you know, I’d never read any news) and I come across this post about the pros and cons for marriage between men and women. Essentially, statistics show that marriage has some health advantages and disadvantages for either gender.

Now, I’m not going to get into the “men have a shorter lifespan than women because women suck the life out of them” thing for two reasons. 1) We all know men have shorter lifespans because they don’t take care of themselves. It’s true. 2) Read number 1. But it’s interesting that married women tend to have less stress but gain more weight. And men? Are less likely to have strokes. Marriage offers an anecdote against depression and high blood pressure, too. But an unhappy marriage basically turns the tables and wreaks havoc on your health.

Still, the article is very hetero-normative so I wonder if any of these benefits or risks apply to marriage (including gay marriage) in general or if some of these are particular to straight relationships alone.


Apr 24

Relationships 101

Getting married did not automatically make me a less selfish person. Saying “I Do” did not mean I suddenly gained all the knowledge and learned all the skills I would need to positive contribute to my relationship. Sure, the desire to be happy and to make Ryan happy was there but desire alone does not magically produce results.

I’ve heard it said time and again that there is no manual for parenting, that you can never be truly prepared. I have yet to personally experience that but I believe the same holds true for many other things, including relationships.

We live in a society where there is no mandatory relationship education, no government sponsored textbooks on the subject. If our sex education is lacking, then education about being in an emotionally healthy relationship is a fairy tale.

We’re left to our own devices and while I have nothing against trial and error in some sectors of life, it becomes a whole lot trickier when feelings are involved.

This isn’t to say that resources haven’t sprung up to fill the need. They have. Therapists and talk show hosts, books, chat rooms and webinars all contain invaluable (well, sometimes worthless) information about how to be in a healthy relationship. But these are all resources you have to seek out yourself, often times on your own dime. Realizing you could use some help and then biting the bullet to ask for it are hard enough but, really, we live in a society where it’s all too easy not to realize we need a little help.

I mean, if you have no education about a healthy relationship to begin with, when do you realize it’s not? If no one has ever told you that it’s important to learn relationship sills or what those skills are, why would you seek out that information on your own? Perhaps this is why our society is strewn with broken hearts and divorce papers. Just a thought.

I don’t necessarily think we should be mandating peoples’ love lives. That’s a bit too involved even for my tastes. I just cannot help but wonder if we could be doing more to help people better themselves and their relationships. When “better” is just an option and an expensive one at that, it’s an option left unconsidered by the majority.


Mar 11

The Institution of Marriage

I must admit that when people talk about banning gay marriage to preserve the institution of marriage, I am entirely confused as to what the hell that means. It’s not like the one man-one woman ideal has exactly helped the institution. Society has come to a point where people view marriage as something as fleeting. Divorce is seen as an acceptable answer to every little problem. People quit instead of facing the facts: marriage is not for the faint of heart but with a little elbow grease, most problems are fixable.

And if you take a look at why people are getting married, you see that many times the intentions are not what can be considered good. They’re selfish or manipulative. People are marrying for money, legal status, because there is nothing better to do or for power. Sure, some people marry for love but society doesn’t seem to have a bone to pick with those reasons. I mean really, it’s like society has made a mockery of marriage anyway so wouldn’t letting people who want to marry because they love each others and their families actually help preserve this institution? Could just be me, though..

Speaking of families, procreation is often listed as a reason why gay marriage is a bad idea. As if gay people don’t want families? It’s not like they haven’t or won’t jump through hoops to have children and manage parental rights. No straight person would stand for that kind of legal red tape so why is it fair to ask that of gay people? And if procreation is so damned important, then shouldn’t we ban people from marrying who have no plans to or are not able to conceive children?

None of these arguments just make any sense when viewed from a logical perspective.


Jan 17

I Do

A decade (or even shorter) ago, I didn’t put much faith in marriage. I couldn’t blame me. At that time, all of my family members who had ever been married had also been divorced, often several times each. I didn’t have anyone to look up to. I had no example that marriage can really work. And, as a teen, I was rebellious enough to not understand what a piece of paper meant. I’d been in love a few times by the time I decided you didn’t need to get married. It didn’t mean anything more than if you were seriously committed to dating. I certainly never saw myself marrying.

And then I met a boy. I fell in love with that boy and, for the first time in my life, experienced happiness the way princesses do in fairy tales. Despite the fact that my every experience screamed that true love doesn’t exist and it’s useless being romantic, I found myself becoming romantic and believing in true love. When that boy proposed, I said yes, like I knew I would. I had known for some time because the idea that I wanted to spend my life with that boy had snuck up on me and planted itself firmly. I had hope.

As I re-evaluate my marriage, and face the idea that I may not be married “until death do us part” (even though, those words were not in our vows), it’s hard to hold on to that hope. Divorce is, if not entirely a start over, at least dramatically life altering. My husband and I share a home, possessions and pets. We share insurance and cell phone plans. While all those things are material and I can ultimately rebuild, they only signify the fact that we share a life together. All the material things serve to represent the emotional things we have come to share: love, trust, confidences, strengths, weaknesses and deepest, darkest secrets. Not to mention the sheer amount of time we have dedicated to one another.

The fall seems so much further, now. Being married has changed my perception about marriage. It’s not just a piece of paper and divorce is not just breaking up. In fact, I’m not sure if I can think of anything more appalling at this moment than the idea of divorce. If the idea of divorce is appalling, the idea of no longer being married to my husband is heart stopping. Perhaps the reason marriage has transformed in my mind, is simple because I do love him so much that, while I may not always remember it, I cannot imagine not spending every day of the rest of my life married to him.

Perhaps if I had remembered that all along, we would not be where we are now and I could simply be celebrating marriage and love and commitment. Instead, I am contemplating my life without those things and nothing could be more difficult.


May 15

You can lead a horse to water..

But you can’t make it drink. Just like you can’t make a person do something. And you can’t open their eyes to the truth of they don’t want to see it. And a million other related cliches.

It’s been a while since I posted anything really personal in here. For a while, I guess I was worried that I might say something about someone I know in the real world ™ and they’re be angry. I also worried that I might say something which someone would use as ammunition against Ryan and/or myself. So I stopped talking even when it might have done me well to speak. In the process, my blog lost its cathartic tendencies and I posted a whole lot less but, truthfully, I miss it. And, truthfully, sometimes there are things you need to get out but the person who needs to hear them isn’t ready or willing or even able to listen. But my blog will.

We fight, like any normal couple. We’re not one of those couples you see on TV who have never had a fight or who freak out because they just had their first fight. No, we fight. Not as much anymore, thank God. It was bad for a while. Sometimes it felt like our relationship was only made of the fighting and the good times were abnormal. There was a lot of other shit going on which affected it so maybe, this time last year or the year before, the fighting was necessary. Maybe we’ve moved to a point where we need to fight less. I hope so. But we still fight.

The fact that we fight is not the problem. I think, when it’s all said and done, we generally understand eachother or can at least agree to disagree. I believe neither of us intentionally wants to hurt the other but we are both sensitive in our own ways, sometimes oversensitive.

The problem is the way we fight. It’s the same every time. We go about discussing the issues in the wrong way and, before you know it, we’re fighting just to fight. We’re fighting about the fight. Except, I think that sometimes I’m the only one who knows it. There are certain triggers and in my mind I think “Oh shit. This is going to set us back 3 months” and then I try everything in my power to avoid the fight which becomes increasingly difficult as I find myself frustrated at the fact that we have let this happen again. That we have not changed.

That he has not changed. I feel guilty typing that because I know I am not perfect. I know I contributed to last night’s fight. I know I am not selfless. If I were, I’d glad want children. I wouldn’t care about school for myself or what kind of job I work. I wouldn’t tell Ryan I want him out of the military or that I don’t like his family. I would grin and bare it and maybe earn myself some just rewards in the afterlife.

No, I am not selfless but I do think I am more selfless than he is when we fight. Except, he doesn’t see it. He can’t see it. It’s like he has some sort of filter that interprets everything I do as selfish no matter how contradictory that may be to the truth. If I tell him to calm down because I know it does no one any good for him to be so upset, he thinks I am defending whatever offense I have committed, rather than trying to keep the fight in check. If I try to explain this, he thinks I am just saying “I am always right and you are wrong.” But how can I say that is not what I am saying? Wouldn’t that just enforce his mindset that I am implying that? I’m not saying you’re wrong or that I’m right. I’m saying what we are doing, what you are doing is hurtful to us? It’s not my pride I’m worried about. I don’t care about saving face, I care about us!

So you see my dilemma. I cannot explain to him that maybe he isn’t seeing things clearly without damaging my platform, without “proving” to him that he is right and I am just being stubborn, stupid or selfish. But I’m not.

Faced with a lose-lose situation, I took the easier route. And by “easier,” I mean that I gave up on trying to explain to him and I told him it didn’t matter despite the fact that it does matter. We have this gigantic issue that he can’t even understand and I cannot possibly explain but I know that it could easily make or break us. The nature of the beast makes it seemingly impossible to tame but fighting like this cannot go unchecked. Because even if the subject of the fight can be resolved, resolution can only come if we can work together and we can’t as long as he sees things this way.

I choked back tears because I don’t know how I can show him the way I see things, how detrimental his thought process and behaviours can be to us. And instead of talking to him, which I knew would do no good, I told him good bye which did us no good anyway. What choice do I have?

It was a shitty answer, I know. Fighting is a stupid waste of time even in the best conditions. It’s even stupider when you fight like we do. It’s absolutely ridiculous when you are separated by thousands of miles of ocean and several time zones. And even as we fight I cannot help but think of how we are squandering time. His internet might decide to act up any minute, as we in the middle of our fight. Or even worse. We shouldn’t be fighting when there is a possibility that he might not even come home.

If I am selfish in any way it is because I do not want to fight. I want to spend every possible moment I can loving him and being loved in return. That is what I fight for.

The funny thing about this all – and I use a very loose definition of funny – is that I understood where he was coming from one he stopped being defensive enough to explain it. And I felt bad. I was sorry. Except he can’t see that I wasn’t fighting with him about how he felt, rather how he went about telling me.

He says I don’t listen but does he realize how hard he makes it? There’s nothing to even listen to when he’s so busy being defensive and brooding and angry and, dare I say, selfish. He thinks I don’t listen but the truth is, sometimes he’s not even saying anything. He jumps to the point where he accuses me of not listening right away, without giving me the chance to listen. Had he told me right away how he felt, I would have been happy to recognize it. Instead, he immediately lets himself get angry and the first I head of how he feels comes as a shock. I’m blown away and if I don’t react maturely, it’s no wonder.

I’m so busy trying to hold everything together and he mistakes the fight in me as fighting him, instead of fighting for us. In return, he fights me. And it’s tiring. I know it won’t be any better if I stop fighting for us but I also know it can’t possibly get any better unless he stops fighting me over false perceptions. In the meantime, I’m surrounded by a rock and a hard place. I know, enough with the cliches already. But they’re so suiting.

So I lied. It does matter and it is important but I don’t know how to get through to him. He’ll read this and I want to hope that he’ll “see the light” but I know he won’t. Maybe we’ll talk about it. It’ll probably turn into a fight and I’ll lie, again, to end it. I guess I’ll just keep lying because it’s the easier difficult choice to make. In doing that, what cliche am I fulfilling?


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