If I was the person I am today the day I got married, I am not sure I would have gotten married.  But, I don’t want a Divorce. That doesn’t mean that I don’t love Dan to pieces and enjoy our life together but it does mean that I don’t know that I agree with all the conditions and expectations that marriage implies or that they are applicable to the people we are today. The person I was in 1993 is nothing like the person I am today so how can I possibly uphold the agreement I made to Dan so many years ago?

I simply can’t.

So you might think that we should just separate and/or divorce but that is not my desire. I like being with someone but I don’t like being held back by any agreement we made long ago.

So what do we do?

Communicate. Renegotiate. Redefine. And most importantly, don’t give a shit what someone else might think of how our marriage is structured. It doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s and honestly, it shouldn’t. As long as we both come to an agreement on how and what our marriage is (to us) then it doesn’t matter if it fits some made up ideology or not.

Dan and I have never had what I would consider a traditional marriage. We picked the person to marry us strictly based on his willingness to marry us outside of a church or the courthouse. We met him at a bar to discuss our ceremony and he was hammered before the end of our meeting. We didn’t ride away from our wedding in a limo by ourselves, instead we piled in as many friends as we could and headed out to the place we met to continue celebrating. We have worked together since 2 days after meeting each other. One of our first vacations together, I took Dan to meet a good friend of my ex-husbands. Our kids weren’t born in hospitals. We home school our children. We are estranged from Dan’s parents and my parents live with us.

Outcome – Has it worked or not

And yet it has worked. And it hasn’t.

When we are being true to ourselves, we are better. When we get caught up in our shit, we suck at this. We recently decided that our now dysfunctional relationship needed to change. We are both tired of trying to be the people we were when we married. Honestly, those two people don’t exist anymore. We have both grown and yet our marriage was expected to stay the same. Well it is time for our marriage to grow as well. We have spent a great deal of time talking and learning about each other again. We are renegotiating the terms of our marriage and redefining how we each fit into it now. The hardest part has been letting go of what we think marriage should look like based on what we have witnessed and heard from others.

It doesn’t matter.

This is our marriage. We can do with it what we want as long as we are open, honest, respectful and communicate with each other. If we aren’t allowed to be ourselves because of the expectation of the marriage, then we both lose and the marriage fails. If we are allowed to be ourselves, we are fulfilled and we bring that fulfillment to our marriage.

Marriage isn’t two halves making a whole but rather two whole people limitlessly expanding.