Baby Steps

I'm sure all of you, who are regular readers, know that I'm a carpool for work. And he is constantly, and I do mean constantly, complaining about his wife. The funny thing is that he's been with his wife longer than Master and I have been together. However, we've been living together longer and married longer.

Master and I have been together for 10 years, living together for 8 years, and married for 6 years. It's nice two year increments leading up to our marriage. We were both madly in love and we knew where it was going before we starting living together but we still wanted to make sure we could live together for an extended period of time and still stand each other. *laughs* We wanted to baby step it. And here we are, still very much in love.

Now, please keep in mind that I only know so much about the relationship of this guy because he tells me. He has gone through the story so many damn times since I started driving the carpool about two years ago. So, they have been together 15 years, on and off. They only lived together for less than a year before they got married. They have been married for 3 years. Like I said, he talks about it a lot. I do not care. At all. But when you are sitting in a car 45 minutes one way you don't really have a way to get away from it. So I just let him ramble on.

Yesterday came another time where he started bitching about his wife. In the back of my head I honestly think part of the problem with his marriage is that they were on again off again. To me, you can't just total it all up. If you had breaks, regardless of the length of time, you can't start it back up and just total up the years as if you were together the whole time. It's just not how it works in my opinion. I also think another part of their problem is that they only lived together for 6 months before they got married. Again, in my opinion, that isn't long enough to find out if you can live together for an extended period of time. You're still in the "honeymoon" period of living with one another.

Yes, I'm going somewhere with this. So here we go..

Yesterday he started asking about my relationship/marriage in between his complaints of his relationship/marriage. So he would bitch and then ask me a question as if he was comparing the two. No worries, as long as he doesn't get too damn deep about it. He was mainly talking time lines.

So I told him. Master and I have never "broken up". Ever. We had some rough stops. We had some very rough spots. But we stood by one another no matter what it was that we were facing. The point is that we faced it together. Some things happened that would probably tear a lot of relationships into a million pieces and would never be able to be glued back together. The pieces never happened. There were no pieces. Nothing even caused a tear. It worked things kind of thin but that didn't even matter. We came back stronger than ever. The things that we have gone through make us what we are today. So, while we went through some heavy shit, we wouldn't be the couple we are today if they had never happened.

He was actually surprised we never broke up or thought about divorce. I mean his jaw literally dropped. I thought that was fucked up. It was like he thought that wasn't even possible.

So then he asked how long we lived together before we got married. I explained the 2 years and why. He then proceeded to state that they only lived together for 6 months because she was Catholic and as a result felt it was inappropriate to live together prior to being engaged. So apparently they were only engaged for 6 months. Here we go into my opinion again.. that's not long enough. You don't give it time to grow before you throw yourself into a highly serious commitment. Don't get me wrong. Boyfriend and girlfriend is serious. Being engaged is also serious. But when you put that ring on your finger that level of commitment amps up a lot.

Not all marriages work and I totally understand that. Sometimes, at some point, you may fall out of love. Or sometimes you just find out that it was a mistake and should have never gone there in the first place. There are many reasons why a marriage doesn't work and I respect that. But I do think just diving in head first without giving yourself and your partner time to wrap you head around it and thinking it out is a lot of the problem. Especially when the couple hasn't been married for very long and you want out.

Basically what it boiled down to is it seemed like he wished he had worked it much like Master and I had. He thought that if he had done that with wife one of two things would have happened. One, his marriage would be healthier or two, he never would have married her in the first place.

Conversations like this, regardless of who they are with, always make me so grateful that Master and I have the kind of relationship/marriage that we do, and that's with leaving the kink out.

See, that's the other thing. I feel that if a relationship is going to be really strong and long lasting there has to be a leader. Not necessarily a kink based leader, but I do think someone has to take charge. If you have both people trying to take the lead it is just going to cause friction and possibly resentment. And it's only a matter of time before that friction blows up. And then you have to try and fix it after the explosion. You may not be able to fix it or if you do there is going to be a lot of wounds being licked and a lot of duct tape trying to hold it together.

We don't have duct tape. We don't have glue. We have built certain parts back up but the wall was never knocked down.