It’s mindnumbing to think about – my husband and I have gone years at a time without any physical intimacy of any kind. He rejected me so repeatedly from the moment we got home from our honeymoon until now (almost 20 years later) that I am almost immune to the …
It dawned on me, after almost 50 years on this earth, how to choose the right mate. It’s something we all wonder about from the time we first begin liking people in our early teens (or earlier), and it’s even easier than making lists of what you want in a …
Well, that was definitely not our last chapter. After I finished writing the book, literally days after, COVID happened. We will all remember March of 2020. Everything shut down, schools closed, businesses closed, and people retreated to their homes for much longer than humans should ever be apart from each …
When I sat down to put this marriage on paper—the bulk of which took only a few weeks and spewed out of me like a geyser—I did it because I felt a strong urge to help other people in similar situations by telling my story. Even though I have journal …
Time and experience are the best teachers. Today I know what I would have done differently in the past. But I do not regret my choices or my life. As I write, I have your life in mind now, and this might help you navigate into or away from a …
Every time I look back at our lives, I’m so glad I never called off our marriage. When I motioned to my best friend in eighth grade that I wanted a life of ups and downs, I wasn’t implying a difficult life of highs and lows. I think in the …
I wrote this book so that our sons can someday read plainly, as adults, about the life they grew up in, and choose to break the cycle when they marry. I hope they value loving deeply someday when they are men. I’ve spoken love to them, held them, listened to …
While change has happened at a glacial pace over the last 19 years, it has happened. For some inexplicable reason, change sped up in the past few years. I’ve mellowed, he’s mellowed, and our expectations of each other have mellowed. I think a lot of my contentedness can be attributed …
My father’s responsibility and reliability were unparalleled. He not only provided for a family of seven, but he also took care of his mother’s nursing home costs, sent money to his siblings back in the Midwest, and put most of us through college or technical school. He took care of …
Over the years, the trait of my husband’s that I’ve worried about most because of its potential effect on our children and their children’s children, if not understood properly, is his tendency to be unreasonably reasonable. When one parent vexes over all of the small stuff and consistently avoids being …
