This Is For the Newlyweds

Recently, I found myself checking in with my husband to see how he was doing; how we were doing. I had sparked a fight the night before, which resulted in him pulling away from me and sleeping on the couch. Curled up in a ball, covered in a blanket and alone, I slept on the floor, because I refused to sleep in the bed if he wasn’t there beside me. By morning I felt a bit broken on the inside, as if some organ had been punctured, and everything inside of it was spilling out and I couldn’t stop it, but I also couldn’t find the source.

So I checked in with my husband in our notebook where we write back and forth to each other to express our feelings about our life together, and everything that accompanies that. This notebook is for the things we can’t, or don’t want to, speak about out loud. So I wrote down questions that reflected my current unhappiness, but asked in a way that would get an untainted answer from him. Some of these questions were, “What are 5 things we did together this week; Are you getting everything you want/desire through this marriage; In what ways can I be a better spouse?” And to finish it all off I said “Please forgive me and help me forgive you.”

To all of these questions, he didn’t answer one of them. Instead he brought up our fight last night and everything it did to him, how he was torn up on the inside, and that that is why he pulled away. He revealed his true feelings to me about everything he’d been bottling up inside. It shocked me, but I knew something hadn’t been right between us for a little while, and in my reply I told him I felt a distance and a change between us to which the fullest expulsion of one’s innermost turmoil came tumbling out.

I stayed in the room as he wrote out his response, I saw the tears roll down his face as the facade came crashing down. He told me about his guilt over our finances, how his stress from work was crushing him, how his “vegging” out on the computer was his only real source of relief, and how he’d been trying to hold down the fort, and keep a strong face, so I could go to school and work, and not worry about anything else, including him. This was the source of the leak. This was my heart, sitting in front of me on the couch broken, because he’d been stretched too thin, burnt out and running on fumes for too long. I knew something had been wrong for weeks, but I couldn’t put my finger on it and here it was, finally, all splayed out before me. I asked those questions, because I didn’t feel like I was getting what I needed, and stress was wearing me ragged (I will explain another time), but it turned out he was doing even worse. From that point on we’ve been gentler with each other, seeking the Lord everyday, and though it’s still a long road to the dream life, we’re going to get there through it all with God’s love, together.