“Do you even love me?”

As soon as the words left my lips I wanted to take them back.  What if he said no? Why would I ask a question that I clearly wasn’t ready to hear the answer to.

My husband and I are nowhere near perfect, but we have always been…together…best friends…there.  For fifteen years we have fought, resolved and rose from the ashes stronger than before.    I think that has always been our talent, we can handle it all.  We don’t always handle it gracefully, but we manage.  When we were in college he once got wasted at a bar and threw up in my purse.  Of course he was promptly booted from the establishment. I was so worried about him I too left and went to his house to make sure he was ok.  He opened the door and told me I smelled like puke, his puke.  When I was pregnant with our first daughter I was so petrified to miscarry a second time that I basically ignored his every sexual desire, convinced that it would result in fetal demise, for nearly a year.  I didn’t give a rip about his needs, truly I didn’t.

Somehow we prevailed.  We made it through college, careers, career changes, kids, more kids, butt loads of kids, no matter the storm we have always weathered it.  This time felt different though.  Our communication has sucked lately.  We have become the definition of ships in the night.  He goes to work before the sun peeks over the horizon, I take care of the house and the kids all day long, he comes home from work at bedtime.  We do the sport- runs, the homework, the play dates, the baths, the shit.  Then we decompress…separately.  He frogs around on his phone, sometimes I do the same.  I work on my blog, he plays Clash of Clans.  We retreat.

Sure we meet in the middle of our marital bed to do what married people do, but back to our spaces we return afterwards, convinced that we need sanctuary even from each other.  How wrong we are.

Read on by clicking HERE!  Any fb shares would be greatly GREATLY appreciated!

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#FABFRIDAYPOST BLOGGER OF THE

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The post We Don’t Need a Break, We Need One Another appeared first on Four Princesses and The Cheese.

I know y’all opened up this post hoping for a juicy tidbit of suburban scandal.  Prepare to be disappointed:

Yes I am dating.

But I am dating my husband.

We are thirty-five years old and we are just NOW getting the hang of “dating” each other. We have been “together” since we fell madly in love many moons ago girating on a ratty old couch to J Lo and Ja Rule.  I simply could not resist his bleached blonde, Eminem-like, spiky hair once we locked eyes across a smoke-filled frat house living room.  From those initial alcohol induced moments our budding romance moved along at warp speed.

We spent each and every second together, partying, studying, and hanging out with friends.  We became friends, lived together, got jobs, moved into apartments, moved into houses , and moved around.  We had four kids, saw less and less of each other, resented each other, recommitted ourselves to each other, worked on ourselves, worked on together, had some more kids, got a dog, fell apart and rebuilt…

All within the span of about fifteen years.

Do you know what we didn’t do during those fifteen years?

We never dated.

We “hung out” “hooked up” and “did things with other couples” but we didn’t ever date each other.  There was no getting dressed up and anxiously waiting to get picked up at the door for an evening out because those younger years were our broke college years.  Neither of us minded though, we were having fun and enjoying each other’s company.  We got married straight out of college and our wedding was a bonified party because that is what happens when you get married in your early twenties.  Kids followed shortly after.  We went to prenatal appointments together, kids’ birthday parties and school events, but still we didn’t really date.  A few times a year we managed a holiday party or anniversary dinner out, but these unicorn evenings were few and far between.  Unfortunately for us, probably due to the lack of dating practice, these nights usually ended in soaring expectations of wild sex and bellies full of booze and food.  Of course fights and hangovers followed and the rare date nights faded out even more with intense work schedules and the addition of twin girls rounding out our total number of children to four.

Still we didn’t seem to mind the extinction of together time because we literally had no time to think.  We have spent ten years in “go mode” and I think that perhaps somewhere in the middle of this mode your brain turns certain parts of emotional consciousness off.

Then about six months back we hit a marital wall.  I suppose that after so many years of sub-par communication and emotions locked into survival cruise control it wasn’t exactly a surprise that we found ourselves sitting on the couch having a coming-to-Jesus talk about where we were and where we were headed.  We needed to air out our years of pent up grievances and lay out our needs simply, clearly and concisely.  Because we didn’t spend those formative years talking and communicating, (Lord knows we spent it doing all sorts of other things) we maybe missed the whole “know what your partner wants” component.  So yes there was hurt, tears, feelings of betrayal and resentment and all sorts of other things that you never really imagine yourself feeling when you fall in love at the tender age of nineteen.  But like a couple of middle aged Phoenixes we seemed to rise from the ashes and rebuild our marriage.

Read on  HERE and give it a Facebook share when you can!

The post I’m Thirty Five Years Old and Finally Dating! appeared first on Four Princesses and The Cheese.