I typically hate marriage posts about how everything works out. Those Brady Bunch feel good stories are nauseating and I do what I can to avoid them. I don’t want to hear about all that lovey-dovey stuff, how you are communicating effectively, and how perfect your life is while you walk down the beach holding hands.
Meanwhile the rest of us are living very real lives that look nothing like that and our journey towards togetherness feels like a heavy weight fight versus a stroll of grace and love.
When we faced life as twenty somethings we were pleasantly naïve and eager to face whatever life had to offer. Our parents silence about the realities of life and their insistence on ignoring problems helped us to look at life with eagerness and hope for our future.
We had no idea what could come into our lives to cause us pain and suffering and the extent to which we would purposefully and ignorantly hurt each other.
When you arrive at midlife your eyes have been opened to the world and you see each other for the real people that you are. You see a bride who can be anything but pleasant. A groom who can inflict a tremendous amount of pain passively and aggressively. You have a history.
There are memories that you can’t get rid of and dysfunction that you have learned to live with and the process of trying to find ourselves and us requires hashing through years of stuff that can cause a great deal of pain, but the process of doing so can be worth it.
Our journey to figure out us started with a unified goal. My husband told me he needed a change and wanted to eventually move back to a water community. I had major hesitations, but something in me wanted the same thing, so we agreed to pursue this new vision for our lives.
We worked on the house to get it ready to sell and within that multi-year process our desire for a new life grew alongside our disillusionment with the status quo. The closer we got to our goal the more we disliked our current life.
We changed and grew next to each other. We provided each other support and a lot of space. We both needed space to fight our internal battles. He was fighting burn out at work, boredom, and lack of purpose and I was fighting depression, serious confusion, peri-menopause, navigating a career transition, and empty nest syndrome.
It was a perfect time to call it quits. On any given day we could have easily walked away from each other. The idea of starting fresh was a good one, and we kept at it by avoiding how is our relationship conversations.
To accomplish our goals we had to reformulate everything to create a new of life and had to look within ourselves to figure out who we were, what we wanted, what we needed to get rid of, and what we wanted our purpose to be here on out.
The unified goal forced us to look at ourselves and us. It was what we needed to find our way at midlife. It wasn’t about moving to a new state, getting new jobs, or a new house. It was about sorting through life so we could figure out what we wanted it to look like from here on out. It is a messy but worthwhile process.
Today we live in a house we bought on the East Coast that is five minutes from the beach, working new jobs, and are enjoying a clean slate from which to continue building a great life. I highly recommend creating a new goal at midlife from which you can work towards and in the process find yourself and renew your marriage. Good luck.
Marcy Pedersen
