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.
My husband and I celebrated thirteen years of marriage yesterday. We’re no experts, but here are a few things that have helped us get to here.
1. Always kiss goodbye.
2. Say I love you when you kiss goodbye, and also say it randomly.
3. Laugh together, often and much.
4. Talk about what is bugging you, before it festers and boils into something more than it needs to be.
This coming Monday, my husband and I will celebrate thirteen years of marriage. Thirteen! Our wedding day seems like it was yesterday and a very long time ago, all at the same time. Our family has morphed from just the two of us to having three kids, two dogs, two cats, and one hundred chickens. Crazy.
I’ve always gotten along well with people of the male variety. Men are less complicated than women (usually). You throw in a hockey obsession and it’s always been easy to be friends with the male variety.
After we got married, my husband and I moved to a small town that is a four-hour drive from the guy friends I (we) had. Friends that I had known in college and in my big city life faded into the background, except for the occasional FB status update. If we lived in the same town, I’m sure there would be get-togethers or the occasional coffee to catch up with each other. Male friends (who are not ex-boyfriends) that got grandfathered into our relationship are a non-issue, as my husband considers them friends as well.
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 has been in San Diego this week for a work conference. I’m happy that he got to go, because I seem to travel more than he does and he deserved the break from our daily routine. The biggest issue with him being gone — for me — is the fact that I couldn’t call/text/email him throughout the day. My sounding board was unavailable, for the most part. We had the chance for an extended chat last night during a layover he had at the Seattle airport and I hope he was able to clean himself from the verbal diarrhea I bombarded him with.
I spent four days and three nights wrangling our three kids, deadlines, and general household duties and lived to tell about it (barely). Here are a few things that kept me sane:
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.
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.
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.)
