Ordinary People.

I spend most of my alone time reflecting on people that matter to me. I often go through my camera roll to see the moments I captured and indulge in the feelings that accompany them. I particularly do this with pictures of my significant other and my children. There are a multitude of people who probably think my family is perfect. They see us and aspire to have happiness and companionship of their own one day like ours. But something that I’m still grappling with is that love is a constant work with inconsistent feelings, ideas and desires. Sometimes it is excruciating and hopeless, until it’s not anymore. Sometimes it’s absolutely blissful and passionate, until it’s not anymore. There are many days where we don’t know how to navigate things to move forward. The only thing that makes it not so bad is that the bad times don’t last forever and we both want to be with each other. Whether in that moment it’s because we really are just head over heels for each other or we don’t want to start over for the sake of our family, what we’ve built and our children. We identify the glue and we keep glorifying it - this is where reminiscing really comes in handy.

I think of it like this - it took my parents and I over 20 years to reach a place where we are no longer hung up over shortcomings or differences. A therapist I went to last year told me that it takes couples roughly 15 years to get on the same page. My desire to attain this dream family became far beyond my patience and expected timeline. And so I framed it this way - lifelong trauma takes a lifetime to get through or over. When you’re sharing that incompletely healed trauma with someone else’s, it’s just damn messy.

Especially when our defense mechanisms and responses are different. I am far more anxious, overwhelming and emotionally full than my partner. He is calm, reserved and lets go much quicker than I ever could. I sit in my feelings and they take over my being. I can’t hide them and usually struggle to continue as if they don’t exist until they just no longer do for me. My vulnerability is triggering for him and his internalization just sets my skin on fire. But according to statistics, this dynamic is the most common emotional structure between couples. A friend I know told me that her husband was ignoring her because he was infuriated and she emptied $150 of his whey protein in the garbage and put the cans back in their cupboard so he can discover it himself and they’ve been married for over ten years. Passion isn’t always romantically fulfilling. It really is unhealthy and toxic at times. I’ve found that it’s in getting back to the balance of things that it can flourish again. The comeback more than the perpetual honeymoon.

Love is hard. Life is hard. But we wake up every day. Might as well we make loving each other as inevitable as that.