Plain Sailing

I have been off line for a while. I wish I could say that I’ve
been involved in incredibly important or life changing events over the past
month or so, but I haven’t; I’ve just been living my day to day life.
Highlights include indulging in a little too much chocolate, actually scrap
that, far too much chocolate, drinking a bit less than I was last year (well
done me), not training for the now abandoned half marathon, trying to remember
to do more loads of washing, remembering to feed Leroy his incredibly expensive
food, being busy at work, basically I’ve been figuring out on an ongoing basis
how to be the best mother, wife, employee and friend that I can be.

Before I start the bulk of this next entry I should say it’s
quite a serious one, about marriage. Maybe I’ve lost my funny. Oh god, please
no. The thing is I have to get this entry out there. A preface to this entry is
the statement: I love my husband. The sentence doesn’t really do the emotion
justice, I could throw in a few hyperbolic statements, like I love my husband SO
MUCH or I love my husband more than anyone or anything on this earth, but I’m
not going to. What I am going to do is use some really really cheesy  symbolism. Our love story is like the ocean.(?HAHA ok, so I haven’t lost my funny, it’s just coming out in a really different way.
Christ. Our love story is like a ocean – that’s worthy of a Facebook status.)  It runs so deep (REALLY?!? I’m reading this back and laughing out loud for all the wrong reasons – this is meant to be
serious. Sorry.), sometimes its calm waters, like it is just now, and sometimes
it’s pretty stormy. Sorry about that. Now you’re done wiping the sick from the
corners of your mouth let me go on... This entry covers the stormy bit. The last
month of silence covers the calm bit.

Naked Chef is an absolutely fabulous man – warm, gentle, loving, funny, mildly annoying (in a way that makes me smile to myself when he’s not looking), but above all the kindest man i know. I would like to say thank you to him for all the help and support I have been on the receiving end of
over our three and a half years together.

Right, with that out of the way, I recently finished reading
‘Committed’ by Elizabeth Gilbert (Liz). That’s her of ‘Eat, Prey, Love’ fame – ‘Committed’
is the sequel to ‘Eat, Prey, Love’, and is both a conversational memoir about
Liz’s thoughts on marriage, while being a research piece on the same topic. I read
the first of Liz’s memoirs in about October or November of last year, and
bought ‘Committed’ straight after, but shelved it, and only recently picked it
up again.

Reading ‘Eat, Prey, Love’ was interesting – I read it for my
work book club. For me, Liz is a bit of a conundrum. So incredibly American,
and very self aware, while reading her works I lurch from being intensely
irritated by her U.S.A-ness (she would italicise the important words in her sentences
– and I could picture her saying EYE-talic not it-alic. To me this is annoying,
but perhaps not entirely her fault...), to being incredibly enlightened and
interested by her thoughts on life, love and the struggle all of us go through
trying to be the best person we can be with someone else by our side.

When I was reading ‘Eat, Prey, Love’ Naked Chef and I were
going through what can only be described as a disgusting patch in our marriage.
We were lost, we were drowning (in that vomit ocean!!), we were hurt, we were
lonely and confused, and I think it’s important to be frank about this, I was
obsessed with the thought of getting the fuck out of there. It was pretty much
all I could think about. In hind sight (always great) I think I was being a
foul human. I was being selfish, moody, nasty, remote and drinking far too much.
Don’t get me wrong, there was no vodka hidden under a bleach bottle in the sink
cupboard, but I was going out probably 4 times a week – not the best for
someone who really should have been at home, looking after her beautiful son,
trying with every ounce of effort she could muster to attempt to save her
marriage, whilst maintaining her newly purchased house. I was mainly going out
as much as I was because I was hiding from all of the above and the knock on
effect was that in my opinion I was being a crappy wife, and realistically, a
less than wonderful mother. It was a really, really sad, confusing time. I felt
like I was constantly lying to myself.

Reading ‘Eat, Prey, Love’ I felt like I was
actually in almost the exact same scenario as Liz found herself in at the
beginning of the book: miserable and lost because of her disintegrating marriage
with no real plan about how to make things better. That’s where the
similarities end really. Liz chooses to leave her marriage and embarks on a year
of travel to get over the break-up, where as I tentatively, thankfully and now happily
chose to stay in mine. But that’s not to say that her musings on the institution
of marriage itself aren’t insightful and interesting as well as incredibly helpful.
I strongly recommend you read ‘Committed’ if you are a married woman, wondering
what happened to you – how the hell did you end up here??

After I got married in August 2009 I found myself feeling
sporadically incredibly uncomfortable with my new found (previously yearned
for) status: ‘wife’. It’s a feeling that really stayed with me until Naked Chef
and I got to our make or break period, just before Christmas in 2010. From the
point I got married, up to Christmas just gone, I just couldn’t reconcile that I
was 27, a wife, a mother and living in a town house with the man that I was
going to be with for the rest of my life. I’ll repeat that last bit, as while
in theory you should consider it before you marry, the ‘for the rest of your
life’ bit, for me, only really hit the morning after, when I went, ‘Woah there,
Forever, you say? Well, that’s a fucking long time.’ Something I probably
should have considered beforehand you say? Well, in return I say I didn’t have
time, I was PLANNING A WEDDING.

Another thing that I would think about was, that I missed
flirting. I miss having a cheeky snog with a stranger who has PICKED ME for the
night. Never mind that someone had picked me forever (that incredibly daunting
word again), I seemed to be incapable of moving my focus away from what I now
call my other trouser leg of time: my ‘what if’ trouser leg. It’s not really
that helpful for your actually present, to be constantly focusing on the
possibility that if X or Y had/hadn’t happened, then you could be travelling/much
thinner/still able to go out whenever I please/a completely different person
right now, and sure as hell not yet married forever. It was this thinking that
brought me to behaving in the despicable way that I did before I decided to
clean up my act. I’m not proud of it, but I think and hope that there are
people out there who can see where I’m coming from, and not judge me as an
unforgivable character having read my above confession.

In the period when Naked Chef husband and I were flailing about,
not being very good at being married to one and other, I had some deep and much
appreciated conversations; much like Liz did when she was writing ‘Committed’,
with women about marriage and relationships. These conversations were hugely
informative and were integral to helping me make up my mind for my part of the
decision making process behind us choosing to keep trying to make our marriage
work.

From reading ‘Eat, Prey, Love’, ‘Committed’ and from the
conversations I have had over the past little while about the state of matrimony,
I have come to the below, probably not massively ground breaking
internationally but never the less, in my case, life changing conclusions.

Marriage and relationships are hard and everyone has their
doubts and gripes about or with their partner.

If you are going through the kinds of decisions that Naked
Chef husband and I were – like should we separate or not, if so who should
leave etc, talking about ‘it’ all the time is exhausting. It is also not always
the most useful thing to do. Try to talk about ‘it’ at designated times or
places, so that you have a bit of emotional relief from the constant worry.


Kindness, tolerance and honesty are the most important things
in any relationship and a lot of people in long term relationships forget about
them. We did.

In the union of two individuals each one will need to adapt
slightly to the other, and while mostly this is a smooth process that happens
over time, there are crunch points where you learn things about yourself and
the other person. It is rarely pleasant, but you are always a little wiser at
the end of it. I have to say, I am feeling a little wise at the moment. Can you
tell?

Hiding from a problem NEVER makes it go away – talking to
each other about it (and it HAS to be to each other, not anyone else – this is
important) is the first step to making things better.

When deciding to stay in a relationship or not, the
question, ‘is it really that bad?’ is an important one.

If you’re not having sex, worrying and not talking about it,
there is a deeper problem. The lack of sex can become like a third person in
your relationship if you are not careful.

Talk, talk, talk.

Padstow does something inexplicable and intoxicating for
relationships in a good way. This is a tried and tested fact.

If you go into couple’s counselling you have to really try
and not just go through the motions, because besides anything else it’s bloody
expensive.

Someone told me that their spouse and they spent nearly two
years living in what they described as ‘icy hatred’. The couple in question had
gone through two separate affairs, years on different continents, and the birth
of their two children, before they reached this patch of black ice. They had counselling
and have been together ever since – but, the counselling took a long time to
work. Two years. Icy hatred. If they did that and made it, then I can always
try harder to make my marriage work.

Sending seedy text messages, however alien it feels at first, works to rekindle dwindling sex life.

Having the love and support of your friends and family to buoy up your relationship is actually really important – much more so than I ever realised before we went through this.

If you have children, you have to make time for date night,
and you have to have some ‘just adults’ time. Otherwise, you go mental. Naked
Chef and I only realised this when we went away for a couple of days after the
crunch point of 2010 – it was magic, and was like we were getting to know each
other again. We now try to go out together, just in adult company, at least two
times a month.

Laughing with each other is good, but don’t use humour to
mask underlying issues.

If your parents, like mine did, see and comment on the fact that
you have ‘dark times and places’ as an individual, and ask your partner to be
forgiving of that fact, it may be time for you to face up to these daemons and
politely ask them to bugger off, so that they stop getting in the way of the
more important things in life.This leads me onto my last rather old hat nugget
of wisdom.

However difficult and however seemingly obvious , you have
to like yourself to be able to make your relationship better. I’ve heard it a
thousand times before, but honestly, never really understood how one does it. I
always greeted this phrase with a silent, rueful, sarcastic, ‘yeah, right.’ How
the hell can l like myself – as I said before, I was and still can be, at the
top of the list of self hated personality traits, quite selfish, amongst so
many other things. Then it occurred to me. How about trying to not be selfish for
a bit? How about cooking, not being a lazy oaf, telling Naked Chef husband that
I love him (out loud), telling him about all of those office based stories that
I once decided he wasn’t interested in or didn’t understand so stopped talking
about them. Tell him about really stupid, mundane things that I muse on, that
will most probably make him think I’m mental, but do it anyway! Talk to him
about everything. Also, I decided to stop beating myself up about the fact that
I’m fatter than a lot of people. Revelation: I’m also slimmer than a lot of
people. If I want to be slimmer than I am at the moment, I have to eat less and
exercise more. It’s not rocket science, and it’s also not a cardinal sin to
love biscuits. So, I did all of the above, and I can safely say, in the time
since the 21^st of December 2010 aka crunch point, I have been trying
to remember most of the above and the result is a much improved but still of course
imperfect, marriage. On top of this my sense of self worth is creeping upwards
one bit at a time. Also, I'm incredibly grateful that Naked Chef husband had the patience and faith to wait for me to get to this point. He sees something in me that I haven't seen in myself, or believed in for a long time and I appreciate him so much for it. It's probably important to say here that forever no longer seems like that long, its not daunting any more. I'm excited that we're growing old together. I got my first grey hair last week and it just made me smile.
I still have my doubts – of course! Its part of who i am to doubt and question, but the key thing is that I’m actively working on all of the above points to get better at being a good wife and a good mum. So as I said, I’ve been off line for a while, and while there haven’t been huge life changing events happening in my absence from blogging world, the fact that I’ve had three smooth and relatively happy, minimally doubtful months, means that I’m so incredibly proud of myself and my family.

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/committed.htm