with Angella Dykstra
I'm a mom of three, a professional accountant, and an amateur photographer and writer. I am not a marriage expert. But my husband and I take "Til death do us part" seriously, and here I'll be sharing how we keep our marriage strong while we both do that insane work-life juggle.
Check out my Work It, Mom! profile and my blog, Dutch Blitz.
I’m sitting here trying to think of what to talk about, relationship-wise. My kids all swarmed me for a snack and a light bulb went off. I told them that I’d like them to answer the question “What does it mean to be married?”
My ten-year-old son replied, “Well, I can’t answer that. I’m not married.”
I clarified that I wanted to know what they thought being married meant, based on what they see between their Dad and I.
I’ve talked about love languages here a few times — and recently — because I believe that they are key thing to know about each other as you navigate married (or dating) life. If you know your spouse’s love language, you can know how to communicate with them on that level. And vice verse.
Lately, I’ve been fascinated about personality types and it’s given my husband and I even more insight into how we each work. He’s 95% introverted/5% extroverted and I’m 60% introverted/40% extroverted. Different, for sure, but if I were a 95% extrovert we’d probably have more conflict.
Do you and your spouse share similar or different personality types?
My husband and I have a lot in common, which is how we ended up being married (Thirteen years this May!). We also have a lot of differences. He is in introvert and I am am introverted extrovert. We have similar, and also different, love languages.
There are a few things I’ve learned over the years about communicating without conflict.
My husband and I aren’t ones to cuss (much). He’s a pastor at the church we attend and there isn’t a lot of cussing that happens in our circle of friends. There is the occasional stubbed toe, etc. that can see me muttering something blue, but I (usually) keep it under control if the kids are around.
Classic curse words aside, there are a number of words that are off limits in our house for both my husband and I, as well as our kids.
Once upon a time (seven years ago), my husband and I attended a marriage course once a week for six weeks. One of the weeks covered love languages and it was a great learning experience. People are wired with different “love languages”, which affects how they feel loved and how they show love. If your love language is, say, “gifts”, receiving presents makes you feel loved and you will tend to show love to others by giving them presents.
I love awards shows — I have ever since I was a kid — and the two of my three kids who (look like me, and) are wired like me love them too. The three of us sat on the couch with a huge bowl of popcorn and watched the Oscars this past Sunday night. I won’t get into the fact how I think they had the worst host ever or how it seemed to drag on and on and on with irrelevant content (See: All the Dreamgirls stuff), but there were some good moments. Most of them on Twitter, but that’s for another post.
There seems to be some uproar over Ben Affleck’s statement when thanking his wife Jennifer Garner.
One of the ways in which my husband and I are most definitely ‘pink and blue‘ is when it comes to our motor vehicles. He books all of the oil changes, he gets the winter tires on in the fall, he gets the summer tires on in the spring, and he enjoys spending time cleaning both of our vehicles, inside and out.
We’ve recently come to the realization that our minivan doesn’t suit our purposes anymore. Well, my husband came to that realization and gave a five-point presentation to me, thinking that I’d put up a fight. I responded with, “That makes sense. You find the new (to us) vehicle and deal with selling the van.” He agreed, because that’s “his department.”
Things have been stressful in our house, between a slower work schedule (Mine) and a double work schedule (His, because of mine), and so many side things that niggle and bother and burn. We learned long ago that going to be angry is a much better solution than staying up until all hours of the night lobbying the same arguments back and forth with no progression.
We’ve had more nights of going to bed unsettled than we’re used to, but we’re managing in the way we’ve been accustomed. In the morning, we hug and say sorry and move forward. (If our issues were deeper than frustration over looking at ONE BILLION church logos that he’s working on when I’d rather be ANYWHERE ELSE, we’d have to hash it out further.)
In my eight years of writing on the Internet, I have been lucky to have very few encounters with mean people or mean comments. My personal site is basically an online journal about my family and myself, and I don’t really talk about controversial subjects that would cause people to cross from ‘respectfully disagreeing’ to ‘being a douche canoe.’
The same goes for this column here and other sites I do freelance writing for. I mean, such sites love it if you push the envelope a bit, because it gets people talking and that’s the name of the game. Even then, I’m considered to be pretty mild in the world of bloggers.
Over the course of our (almost) thirteen years of marriage, my husband and I have traded the “top spot” of primary breadwinner. Until last April, I had the “coveted” spot of bringing in the higher pay check and then our roles reversed. Since then, he has been working two jobs and I’ve been working half-time hours. I’d like to find more work so that he can ease off of the labor job he’s doing, but so far we’ve been out of luck.
