There are two things I need to preface this with before I start:
First, marriage is hard. Second, for those who don’t have a Peloton bike, the unclipping of the shoes takes a while to master. You are essentially stuck. Even now with being pretty much a pro at unclipping, I don’t want to have to stop to do it I make sure everything is done before I clip in. It’s just a pain.
I know you are wondering what these two have with each other and the short answer is: nothing. But it's important to set the scene for what happened a year ago.
My one escape is working out. I love it. We have a workout room in the basement and I go down there and it's just my time where I don’t think about anything else. If you’re married, sometimes you know an “escape” may be from the person you’re married to. Not in a bad sense. Just in an “oh my gosh you are driving me crazy lately” kind of way. And that’s ok and normal. I’ll get to that more in a minute.
We love our spouses but we all go through periods that it seems like we are great and then there are periods where it seems like we can’t get on the same page about anything.
So back to my Peloton escape. I go down to the basement. If the kids are there they are usually good about not coming down while I’m working out. That day was different. They all needed to be in the workout room with me. We also have a small tv in there with a DVD player attached (kids, ask your parent what a DVD player is) for when I used to have workout DVDs I’d do. As I’m huffing and puffing the kids ask if they can put a DVD in. At this point I don’t care. I just wanted to be able to finish my workout. Put in a DVD. Go for it.
Turns out I made a big mistake by not asking what DVD they chose. As my oldest popped it in, the main menu appeared: The Wedding Celebration of Meghan and Sean.
Oh. My. God.
No. This is not what I want to watch. But at this point my focus is still on just finishing the workout. About 2 seconds in to the video, the kids ditch me. They head upstairs and outside. The wedding DVD plays. I have no remote. No one to yell for. And I’m essentially “stuck.” Do I get out and turn it off? Is it worth the hassle of unclipping? Of stopping my workout? But as I’m annoyed by my husband in the moment do I want to sit there and watch 23 year old me recite my vows with puppy dog eyes while I look forward to the magically happily ever after? So I’m doing the one thing I love. My escape. Escaping from him. And now in a (not so) cruel twist of fate I’m stuck watching our wedding video.
We need to be real for a minute. And more importantly we need to talk about it.
Marriage is hard.
So many times we fear saying this because by saying this we assume people will think our marriage is in trouble. We worry people will gossip or start rumors.
As there is a stigma around mental health, there is too about marriage troubles or disagreements or even couples counseling. But why? It doesn’t mean we are any less committed to our marriage or don’t love the other person. It just means we are being honest. And in talking to so many women, I realized so many feel the same. Marriages, like life in general, ebbs and flows. But we fear by talking about it, we are making our partner seem unfavorable. And that’s not the case. The fact of the matter is it’s HARD. Living together is hard. Parenting together is hard. As much as you may have someone who has the same morals and values as you, nothing will be perfect. You won’t agree on everything. You won’t even always LIKE each other. We need to talk about it. We need to stop pretending that the pictures on Instagram or Facebook are real life. It gives us a false sense of “what’s wrong with us? Why aren’t we like them?”
I was about to turn 19 when I met my husband. We’ve been together ever since. I’m now 37 and he’s 39 and we have 3 kids. Neither of us are the same people we were when we met. We shouldn’t be. A lot of life has happened. A lot of events have happened that have changed us. You do the best to navigate through but at the end of the day you need to learn to love the person for who they are at this moment and hope they can also love you for the person you have become.
And that’s also hard. To remember what it was that made us fall in love to begin with. What we promised to each other before life got crazy and complicated and kids.
So I sat there on the bike that day and I laughed. At the irony of it all. And I said “ok God, what are you trying to show me here? I know this wasn’t by accident.”
I know deep down what He was trying to tell me. Go back to where it started. Remember the reasons you chose each other to spend the rest of your life with. Look at the vows you took for better and for worse. Look at how exciting it was to begin your life together before you knew what it would entail.
The greatest example of our love for each other— our kids—
without realizing it forced me into reflecting on that.
They also made me realize that locking the basement door from then on was a must and making sure the remote was within arms length at all times.
I like this, it's honest. Thanks for the Twitter follow btw ;)
- Barry