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I’m Committed to Being a Better Partner to My Husband than My Parents Were to One Another
My parents will be married for 50 years this July. As a marriage and relationship coach who lives through relationships in trouble all day long and who is on her second marriage herself, I know better than most what a miraculous feat it is to reach a mile marker of spending 50 years together.
And my parents are amazing together, especially now. They’re softer, more forgiving, gentler and infinitely more affectionate with one another. As an adult, I now have the privilege to see my parents tell one another, I love you and give each other kisses.
Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s seeing one another through illnesses and health scares, and maybe it’s the letting go of all the crap that we carry when we’re younger that has changed them over the years. I may never know why, but I’m grateful to be a witness to their love now 50 years in the making.
That doesn’t mean it was always sunshine and rainbows at our home growing up and it does not mean my parents have done it all perfectly. Like all of us, my parents are human, and they did the best they knew how to do.
My Dad changed or quit jobs frequently, which would always place us in financial insecurity, many times having to pick-up the family and move cities and schools. He would be without employment or be under-employed, which I think made my Mom have to step-up as the financial provider, even when it was grueling to do so.
Dad always wanted to become an entrepreneur, but I think his fears held him back in a way that he couldn’t express or conquer. I get the sense that they have spent more time worrying about money than they ever did feeling abundant in their lives, and financial difficulties certainly will take their toll on almost any marriage.
So what I learned was that, as a woman, you could not rely on anyone else to take care of you—financially or otherwise. I learned that you could only count on yourself and I’m now committed to unlearning that lie that can be toxic to my marriage.
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Last summer, my husband told me he wanted to leave his job in the next year so that he could pursue his entrepreneurial dreams and all my fears immediately came to the surface:
Who would carry the health insurance? Would I have to go back to corporate work (because we couldn’t possibly both be entrepreneurs…)? Are we going to walk away from a government pension? Would we be okay financially? And could he be successful as an entrepreneur?
What my beloved heard in the midst of all those fears was, she doesn’t believe in me. And when I was honest with myself and him, the truth was, I didn’t. I didn’t believe that anyone else was to be fully trusted to take care of me and I had long held the belief that I have to carry the financial load to be truly secure.
My husband is a strong, proud man so you can imagine how that made him feel and the doubt and distance that were created between us as a result.
But being a coach myself, I knew that I needed to do my own work to manage my thoughts and anxieties around this because that certainly wasn’t how I wanted to feel about my marriage or my husband.
I wanted to trust.
I wanted to be genuinely excited for him and see him be wildly successful.
I wanted my husband to feel supported in the same way he had always supported me.
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Since then, I’ve been able to see very clearly how the anxiety I was feeling was a result of an old fearful story from my past creeping into my present. My husband is not my father, their experience is not ours, and we, as a couple, are not my parents.
My parents are an amazing couple. Like all of us, their relationship was imperfect, but it was built on love and doing the best they could over the course of five decades. And still, I am committed to being a better partner to my husband now than my parents were able to be for one another in the midst of raising a family while moving through life.
As the late, great Dr. Maya Angelou said,
Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.
We often get presented the lessons we most need to learn. Therefore, it’s no surprise to me that my husband stopping one career so that he can begin another brought up all my struggles with trust so that I could finally learn a crucial lesson that has brought us closer than ever.
My husband and I have a story to write that is all our own.
This is just the next adventure for us.
And I cannot wait to see him soar.
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This post has been republished to Medium.
Photo credit: iStock
