LESSON ONE: BEFORE YOU WERE MARRIED

 I vividly remember my dad cooking us dinner every night in the week outside of pizza Fridays. There was no question at all as to whether we’d eat dinner together as a family. It was just a give in. So when I got married (nearly 20 years ago) and my husband’s late hours left me sitting alone, it was a tough thing to digest (no pun intended). 

One of the expectations I'd brought into our marriage was the visual of the dinner table meal we’d have every night. I quickly learned, as we’d go through the next first few years of marriage together I’d find that a lot of things I’d expected to happen didn’t. Because I wasn’t aware of these expectations, I became sad, depressed and felt like our marriage was broken. I went into marriage thinking of it and expecting it to be like the one my parents’ had and at that time they’d been married for 27 years. I didn’t think that a new marriage looked different than the one I’d grown up seeing (or as far back as I can remember seeing) but I wasn’t around for the very beginning of theirs. It’s kind of like adopting a puppy after your 13 year-old dog passes away. You forget about all the accidents, all the training, all the mess you go through for the first couple of years before that new dog becomes more complacent like the old one. 

There are so many examples of what I was amiss on and life still throws us curve balls every single day no matter how well we think we’re prepared. From marriage to having children, career changes and moving homes, even possibly losing our loved ones, life keeps us adapting. We know this now even more as we adapt to working and learning from home. Even though we can adapt - and we do -  that doesn’t keep us from the sadness and even grief we have over things that aren’t what they appeared they would be. 

One of the easiest emotions to access is anger and with anger can come blame. Instead of pausing to identify the hurt, we often go straight to blaming our partner as a result of something we’re feeling, even if what we’re feeling isn’t necessarily their fault.

If our first lesson, we're going to be taking a hard look at your expectations. Not the ones you think your partner has for your or the ones your children have. Nope, we're peeling back what our expectations were before all of that. We're going pre-marriage, back to the beginning.