Figuring It Out

So I just got married a little over a month ago, (I'm sure you've read all about it on my Mom's blog, Life's Funny Like That!), and already, it has begun. I knew, going in, that marriage wasn't gonna be easy. I knew it was a LOT of work. I knew there would be times we would disagree, times where I would look at this man I had chosen to be my Life Partner, and say to myself "what the HELL were you thinking?!?" We manage to work through them all, talk it out, and weather the storms. We have not once gone to bed angry, which is a good thing! There are times, though, that a problem seems so big, it scares me. Times where I wonder, "What if I screw up? What if there comes a storm so big, we can't weather it?"
The scariest time, for me, was not something that happened in my own marriage. Oddly enough, it was someone else's marriage. When Mom talked to me, and told me that she and Tim were going through a rough patch, I was shocked. When she told me she wasn't sure if their marriage would survive this rough patch, I got scared. I looked at her, heard her say this, and was scared for my own marriage. See, for years I looked at Mom and Tim's marriage as an example of something to strive for, what a marriage should be. The so-called "Perfect Marriage", if you will. This was why I had waited so long to take that plunge into marital bliss. I needed to be sure that this was the right man, that I could spend the rest of my life with him and not have to worry about the what-ifs. I finally found that man. I married that man. I was sure that things would be great, as long as I tried to emulate Mom and Tim's marriage. When Mom said this, I thought to myself, "If Mom doesn't know if her marriage will survive this storm, how will mine deal with the storms to come?"
Of course, for anyone that reads my Mom's blog, you know the ending to this story. She and Tim are fine. They weathered the storm, survived the rough patch. In the process, I learned a valuable Life Lesson. No marriage is perfect. Mom told me that storms WILL come, very quickly. They will seem big, at the time. They will take you by surprise, and you WILL wonder if your marriage can survive. What makes a good marriage is NOT how many of these storms come, it's how you, as a couple, deal with them. Because more often than not, these storms will pass just as quickly as they came in. No marriage is perfect, but as long as you have found someone that is worth fighting for, and you fight hard to keep them, it's as close to perfect as it will ever be.