IS A WOMAN STAYING IN A MARRIAGE ALWAYS CONSIDERED AS SETTLING?

My husband and I have been married for more than 5 years now, but have been together for more than 10 years. For me personally, marriage is just a piece of paper. I can honestly say that I regret getting married. It’s not like I regret being in a loving relationship with my husband. That would never happen even if we ever got divorced and were on bad terms. In retrospect, though, marriage didn’t change our relationship at all. At the end of the day, a piece of paper is just a piece of paper. If a married couple is estranged and feel that divorce is the only way out, they’ll get divorced. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are. If you want to get divorced, you’ll get divorced.

No relationship is easy. My relationship with my husband is no different. We definitely had our ups and downs in the past, and we sure will in the future as well. We already had gone through a lot of hardships before we got married, and we had all the reasons in the world to end our relationship then. But we didn’t. We worked through our issues as a team and moved on to get married.

I’d say the roughest patch we’d ever gone through to this day was back in 2018. We were married for 1.5 years by that point, but together almost 7 years. I guess you could say that the main issue in our marriage was that we had issues from before we got married. I recently heard someone say that if you get married before fully resolving your issues as a couple, these issues escalate even further once you do get married, and that’s called settling. I do believe that unresolved issues can escalate. That’s 100% true. What I don’t agree with is that it’s settling.

In my case with my husband, we really wholeheartedly believed that we resolved our issues prior to our marriage. In reality, though, we were avoiding the real problems that we were struggling with because we were trying to make ourselves believe we solved them when, in reality, we didn’t. The more time that passed, the more problems we were having. We loved hard, and we fought hard. Not only were we dealing with our unresolved issues from before marriage, we had new issues coming in as well. It goes back to one of my previous posts where I wrote about not forgetting about the mental health of our loved ones. I mentioned that overall, statistics show that 50% of marriages fail, whereas 75% of marriages fail when one person in the marriage has a chronic illness. That’s exactly what we were going through at the time. We were both having a tough time navigating our life together as I struggled with epilepsy.

We were really trying our best to make things work, but our best didn’t seem good enough. Things got really bad by the end of 2018. By the end of that year, I made myself a Tinder account. I knew exactly what I was doing. I was looking for something that I wasn’t getting at home with my husband. All my single girlfriends were complaining to me that they had a hard time finding themselves good guys online. I had a completely different experience with online dating. I made a connection with the first I ever chatted with through the app. He was just a year older than me. He was Jewish just like me. He was from Israel just like me. He had a background in Human Resources, just like me, and even owned his own recruitment firm.

He seemed absolutely perfect on paper. He was the exact opposite of my husband. After a couple of weeks of chatting back and forth on the app, my ‘online boyfriend’ asked me out. The fact that I have cerebral palsy and epilepsy didn’t change his opinion of me whatsoever. In fact, I think that he was more eager to go on a date with me when I told him. As soon as my ‘online boyfriend’ made his official move on me, I had an epiphany.

I realized I wasn’t ready to give up on my marriage for someone that only seemed to be perfect on paper through an app. At the end of the day, perfection is only an illusion. In reality, there’s no such thing as perfection. There’s no such thing as ‘the perfect man.’ Even Hilary Duff’s 2005 movie of the same name proved it to be true.

As soon as I made that realization, I stopped all communication with my ‘online boyfriend’. He was a great guy, and I hope he found his happiness all these years later. But my marriage came first. I didn’t settle by staying in my marriage. On the contrary, I figured out for myself what was most important to me in order to be happy, and it was thanks to my ‘online boyfriend’ that I did. I didn’t stay in my marriage because I felt pressured to due to my life’s circumstances or because I felt no one else would ever love me or because divorce would be too expensive. I stayed in my marriage because I believed in my husband and I believed in our marriage.

I can honestly say now that my husband and I are in a very good place now. Of course, we don’t know what the future holds. No one does. But we know that marriage is hard work, and that we’re always going to be wiling to put our relationship first.