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Seven-Year Itch

August 25, 2011 By Jami Rogers 3 Comments

The seven-year itch is a term defined as “the inclination to become unfaithful after seven years of marriage”. The term originally came from a 1955 movie called The Seven Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe. In the movie, the male actor is publishing a book that claims after seven years a man in more likely to cheat on his wife and want to leave the marriage. Though quite interesting, this is not the definition I am using when I refer to the seven-year itch.

The definition I am using is “the inclination for the marriage relationship to become unusually tense in the seventh year”. And since hitting the seven year marker I have indeed noticed my marriage relationship has become more tense and I have been wondering why reaching this milestone would cause this?

When my hubby and I got married things were indeed hard for the first year. It was a period of adjustment. We never lived together before marriage and never really lived alone, we were either living with the folks or in the sorority/fraternity house. So in the first year we were setting up house, learning to live together, figuring out how we wanted our family to function, and trying to assert our independence from our parents. Plus we were starting our careers or at least starting the first of many jobs we took right out of college. All of this combined created a very tense first year. Oh and we moved three months into our marriage which really added to the stress. Haha. I forgot about that.

But after that first year we found our groove. We were One as the bible says and we have had a fairly easy ride. Until this year. Now let me state my hubby and I have a great relationship. Nobody wants a divorce. In fact the D word is not allowed in our house. Nobody cheated. Nothing major has occurred. But we have hit some turbulence in our usually peaceful marriage ride.

So what has happened since we hit the seven-year mark that could have caused this tension? Well, we short sold our townhouse, moved, and became renters again. Our wonderful little man started the “terrific” three-year old phase of his life (and anyone with kids knows why “terrific” is in quotes). Our baby is now one year old which means he is learning how to hit, push, throw tantrums, etc, etc, etc. Lastly, hubby’s work situation has been up and down the past year or so with the waves of the economy.

But I don’t think this is just happening to us. I bet this is true for many couples who reach the seventh year of marriage. After being married this long I think a bunch of life decisions and family situations start colliding. We are older, our kids are growing up and entering new phases. Phases we haven’t learned how to parent yet and we are desperately trying to figure them out. Financial situations have changed. Goals and dreams have changed or need to be reevaluated.

How can the seventh year not be rough?

Realizing our situation and all the circumstances involved has helped hubby and I look at this time, though turbulent, as a season that will soon pass. I think as long as we look at our marriage as a journey and not a destination then we know with God’s help we can get through anything. That is true love. And true love prevails no matter how much itching there may be.

Filed Under: Relationships

Let’s Be Friends

July 29, 2011 By StaceyRobinson 3 Comments

As of this very minute, I have 599 friends. I know this, because Facebook has counted them for me. I’m astounded, mostly because I think that if you were to parade all 599 past me, I’d be hard pressed to identify them all.  If I were being brutally honest, I’d be hard pressed to identify them with the aid of name tags and someone whispering their names in my ear.  And because my friend count is so close to some arbitrary milestone of rampant popularity— as determined by me and chosen mainly because the number itself is easily divisible by one hundred and looks so large— I have stopped to give some thought to the close, personal relationships that comprise my life among the pixels of Facebook.

Facebook could not have appeared at a more propitious moment for me.  In late 2009, my world was in turmoil.   My divorce was being  finalized, every relationship I had was morphing faster than a popsicle melts, and I was questioning every aspect of my life.  What better hideout than Facebook, where I could journey in my personal Way-Back machine, revisiting all the major epochs and episodes of my life?   What magic: a hoard of half-remembered names from my past, clamoring to friend me, to reconnect and reminisce.  From one to many, in a virtual instant.

After hours ruminating on the nature of these friendships– pixelated, electronic versions of the real world— I have come to this conclusion:  with rare exception, I have the exact same relationships on Facebook with my 599 friends as I do in real life.

The vast majority of my Facebook friends are basically tangential to my virtual life, found in random posts and on random walls.  I say this with neither rancor nor condescension.  They are the childhood friends, acquaintances of adulthood, business contacts and distant relations, people I barely knew in the world of brick and mortar, and barely know now through bytes of ether.  There’s an occasional intersection, much like bumping into someone at the grocery store— a vaguely intimate startlement, quickly concluded.

Then there are friends from the distant fog of memory, people who at one point loomed large, then got unknowingly lost and are now found.  We spend an hour or two on the phone, or linger over lunch, catching up, playing “Remember When,” promising a next time.  But “next time” becomes like blue moons and flying pigs. We live our lives, we change and grow and become, and while we can look fondly at what our lives were, there may be a reason that we misplace and drift and move. So I appreciate the tenuous presence of all my pasts, smile at their postings— and remain contentedly distant.  And if I have some free-floating concerns that I am falling short in the keeping-up-with-friends ledger, I remind myself that my inbox isn’t exactly overflowing with inbound invitations.  Boundaries are set and lives are lived.

Of course, Facebook has become just one more channel of communications for my frequent flyer friends.  We talk and tweet and chat and ping.  We even see one another with some regularity.  Facebook allows us to be both more intimately connected and disconnected at the same time.  It’s all good.

So why maintain this cluttering of friends?  Because even among all that clutter, there are rare gifts of grace.  There are people who shift the pixels for the better.  They start on some distant shore and become solid; relationships that mostly didn’t exist before, but upon which I now depend.  They’re people I’ve known for forever— or at least known of.  They are  surprises, joined less by nostalgia and chance encounter and more by shared joy, shared sorrow, intertwining lives.   These friends are real and solid for all that they are ones and zeroes.  They are gifts, unexpected, unlooked for.  And my 600th friend, or the next or the next may be one more exception, one more gift of grace. And that will make all the difference.

Friend me on Facebook, or read more about my search for connection here: www.staceyzrobinson.blogspot.com

(Image from wikipedia)

Filed Under: Relationships Tagged With: , , , ,

Rocky Relationship

July 18, 2011 By Addison Renick 3 Comments

I think it’s well documented throughout history that mother-in-laws (MILs) and daughter-in-laws (DILs) have generally rocky relationships. Of course there are exceptions, and thank goodness for them because they give the rest of us hope. Being married for years gives me personal knowledge and experience on this topic and I am sad to say that my relationship with my MIL is the norm – - not great.  It’s better, much better, than say when my husband and I first got married. Heck it’s better than three years ago….but it’s still not great. The underlining cause of my not great relationship with my MIL is that we really have nothing in common. My husband could not have married a woman more different than his mother. (So really it’s my husband’s fault.) My MIL is very into fashion, what’s trendy, and what’s popular.  I, on the other hand, have owned some of my clothes for over 5 years and don’t care about what’s trendy at all. I’m very active and my MIL is not. My MIL loves romance novels and I prefer historical fiction. You see what I am saying? We were basically doomed from the start. If she and I had just met on the street we would not have given each other a second glance.

Over the years I have spend a lot of time wondering, pondering, and analyzing over our relationship and why most of my friends don’t get along with their MILs and here’s the facts I came up with…..First and most important, women as a gender are very possessive and controlling, especially concerning the men in our lives. We want and demand the attention from our men and their loyalty. So for a mother that has been the woman in her son’s life for the past 24+ years to suddenly be demoted into second place by this other women is very upsetting. Alternatively for the wife trying to set up her new life with her husband and making their own family, it is very upsetting and threatening for her new husband to side with his mother in a disagreement. Second, women can be very mean. The moment a woman feels threatening for any reason the claws come out and we start swinging. Third, I think people are adverse to change. A new DIL shakes things up and stirs the pot in the once peaceful MIL’s life. My MIL does things very differently than I do or my mother does and vice versa. And everyone thinks their way is the right…..right? Lastly, just because two people are in a family together doesn’t mean they will get along. Even when you are biologically related, if you don’t have things in common with your siblings, parents, or cousins then you are not going to have a great relationship.

It’s a sad fact that most MILs and DILs don’t get along. Gaining these facts and trying to see things from my MIL’s perspective has been helpful for me over the years. Having children has also helped me see her side on many things. I still don’t agree with my MIL on most issues and I wouldn’t react the same way she does, but I now have a deeper appreciate for her feelings. For me and my MIL, we have both learned to agree to disagree on certain issues and to bit our tongues at times. At the end of the day most of our arguments aren’t important in the whole scheme of life and whether we like it or not we are both in this family together….forever…and ever….and ever. Oh dear.

Filed Under: Relationships

Everything but…

May 8, 2011 By Dashing Gray 4 Comments

“I’m not saying that everything is survivable.
Just that everything except the last thing is.”

~Quentin Jacobson, Paper Towns by John Green

In speaking with a student today–an ambitious young woman who has endless creativity and enthusiasm and maturity beyond her years–I discovered that she was “sort of broken up” with her boyfriend of 6 years. He sees their recent history as her distancing herself from their relationship; she sees it as taking time out to figure out who she really is.

I commend her for this. The better you know yourself, the more ready you can be for a relationship because you are coming into it as one whole person–not a half of a person who seeks the other.

Yet she feels guilty about the whole thing. She is constantly being told by friends that she is selfish and foolish because she is not devoting enough time to “her man”–the man who, by the way, these same “friends” insist she needs to marry ASAP.

I feel for what she’s going through. It is hard to be a young woman, even in the advanced-technology, improved-womens’-rights era of today. The truth is that no matter how far women have come, people will always question us. Friends and family will want to know why we can’t just settle down already. The enormous wedding industry will tell us how we should run everything for “the big day” (consequently reminding us that there is no question about whether or not we should have said day). Womens’ magazines–I’m looking at you, Cosmo–will always focus more on men than women. All this mixed with our own fears, insecurities, and worries that we’re not doing things “right,” or that we’ll die alone.

And then there are all the choices. We live in a fast-paced, information-saturated society that is more advanced than any before it. We have access to countless ideas instantaneously and constantly–all in the palm of our hands. While the generations before were expected to take a job–with limited options, if you were female–for the rest of their lives, we have an overwhelming cornucopia of opportunities at the beginning of our careers and throughout our lives.

Yet with these opportunities comes a price. It’s a paralysis that seems to particularly affect the most ambitious and analytical of women. We see everything. We want to do everything, and we want to do it perfectly. We’ve been told since birth that we can do anything.

But the paralyzing truth is that we can’t. There are still barriers in our lives, in ourselves, and in society that keeps us from doing everything we want to do.

Once, there was the metaphorical path in the yellow wood. A path, and an elusive second option. Today, there is a multi-lane freeway in those same woods. They’ve ripped down the trees and radiated roads out in all directions. And as we stand at the center of all those roads, looking out further than we ever could before, we realize that eventually, we’ve got to pick one. Because we have to move forward in our lives. Because not picking one really isn’t living. Because we’re ambitious and we want to grow.

But we stand in those woods for a long time, struggling to choose our path. We eventually realize that, in opening some doors, we close others. We can’t do anything because we want to do everything. We’re meticulously hand-crafting the lives we want for ourselves, but there are too many question marks.

But that doesn’t mean that life isn’t worth the journey, even when saying “yes” is more terrifying than saying “no.” Because, dear student, there are countless choices out there. We can read and research forever. We can take in countless facts and advice, but eventually we must act. And when we act, things may not turn out the way we had hoped. But they will be real. We will be moving forward in the highway of life, and new exits and opportunities will pop up along the way.

And the truth is, not everything is survivable.

Just everything but the last thing.

Filed Under: Misc, Motivate, Nostalgia, Relationships, Spirituality

Misunderstood.

March 9, 2011 By Uncorked V 11 Comments

I have no idea how to have an adult relationship.  I don’t mean adult as in sexual, I’m pretty familiar with those.  Coming from an almost thirty year old woman, that probably sounds a little crazy.  My initial thoughts were that I’m sure I can figure it out as I go along.  I’m pretty good at most things I try.  But hey, for fun, let’s throw in the fact that my boyfriend lives 2,500 miles away.

Yeah.  Because, you know, I love a challenge and all.

After over nine months of texting, emailing, chatting, talking on the phone, talking in person, IM’ing we finally had a moment of well … misunderstanding.  Really our first.  So much of this came from circumstance and both of us having really terrible weeks at work and with other commitments.  But our communication has been off all week too, and then today, kind of came to a head in a series of highly misunderstood emails about something as stupid as a horoscope.

Really, V?  A horoscope?  Yes.

Obviously it wasn’t the real reason for the misunderstanding, but was just the catalyst to the actual breakdown.  Do I feel weird writing about this right now?  Yes.  I’m by nature a very private person (of course I understand the irony of this statement and the fact that I am a blogger).  But really, when I’m in a funk or something is really bothering me, I tend to just close myself off from the world and deal with it.  I figure it out.  It gets better and I move on.  I have never had someone genuinely interested in knowing what was wrong, or truly care to try and make it all better.  And if they couldn’t make it better, to do everything in their power to make me laugh and smile.  I do have that now.  But it’s hard to know when to open up and talk it through versus when to just say “You know what, hon, I’m having a crappy day.  Let’s talk tomorrow.”

Does distance make it worse?  Absolutely.  It’s so much harder to judge a mood, or a tone, and on top of everything else you’re dealing with to have to deal with not being able to just go hug the person you want to see more than anyone. 

The person you want to see more than you want to be alone.

That was a very difficult revelation for me since I have dealt with things on my own for so long.  Forever, really.

And then I cried.  A boy hasn’t made me cry since I was 17.  And then I realized just how vulnerable I am when it comes to this person, and then cried a little more when I realized how okay I am with that.

I may be in trouble over this one, folks.

Photo courtesy of Sangent.

To read more by V, visit her blog at *uncorked.

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