Valentine’s Day has come and passed, but this year it really made me start thinking about romance. I’m sure that’s in part because I now officially write about love and marriage. But as the ads on television and the radio were dedicated to talking about getting gifts for the holiday, as friends posted pictures and comments on their Facebook pages about what their husbands got them or the frantic lines of men in department stores and flower shops on the day, I really began to wonder: why is romance so one-sided? Think about it: usually when we think about something … Continue reading →

My parents divorced after twenty-six years. It threw our family into a tailspin, but after the dust settled and we started to look at patterns and how it all could have come about, we identified many contributing factors. I’d like to share some of those factors with you. My mother was raised in an abusive home. She left for a time to go to college, but she knew that marriage was the only way she’d be able to leave permanently. My father was raised with the expectation that he was to get married, but without a more clear goal, such … Continue reading →

I love the song “You’re Still the One” by Shania Twain. It perfectly sums up the feelings I have about my marriage—because of our age difference (my husband was 34 and I was 19 when we got married) people thought we wouldn’t make it, and you know what, we did. We’re going on sixteen years at the end of the month, and we are even more in love now than we were at the time. He’s still the one I run to, the one that I belong to, and still the one I kiss good night, as the song says. … Continue reading →

Guys, I feel sorry for you. I really do. You marry the love of your life, the sweet angel who fills your days with light, your heart with joy … and then reality sets in. She has PMS. Gone is the beautiful vision of love you thought you married. In her place is a snappish shrew who screams and throws things at you. Okay, so, that’s a little overdramatic. But it’s true that many, many women suffer with PMS, and you guys feel helpless to do anything about it. The advice I’m about to give may not work for everyone, … Continue reading →

None of us are born knowing how to be married. It’s something we have to figure out. We come into our marriages with the ideas we gained by seeing how our parents handled their marriages, and sometimes that’s a good thing, and sometimes it’s not. With divorce rates what they are, and even what they were when we were growing up, not all of us were raised in two-parent homes, and those who were often saw discord that wasn’t handled well. Sometimes we learn more about married life from television than we do from reality. We don’t always have a … Continue reading →

Marriage takes a whole lot of trust. You go into it trusting that the person you’ve chosen will always be there for you, will be faithful to you, will be careful of your feelings, will help you attain the things you need to be happy. When something happens to break that trust, you may feel misled, alone, abandoned, shattered, deceived—there are countless words to describe the emotions you might have. I think the greatest of them all is “hurt.” A loss of trust is not only an emotional hurt, but it can cause a deep, physical pain as well. For … Continue reading →

I love finding correlations to life in all my experiences, be it in overhearing a conversation or watching a movie. Everything can be taken as a lesson, and if we’re willing to look beneath the layers, we learn so much. This was further brought home to me the other night as I sat watching the classic movie “Gentleman’s Agreement” with Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire. The premise of the movie in and of itself was thought-provoking: Peck, starring as Skyler Green, is a journalist tasked to write a series on anti-Semitism. He struggles for a time to get the angle … Continue reading →

Are you friends with your spouse? I don’t mean, do you like each other in addition to being in love, although that’s a very good thing to. I mean, can you really sit down and have a long conversation with your spouse and come away from it feeling as though you’ve just had a really good talk with a friend? I am so lucky in that I’m married to my best friend. It’s not something that happened immediately—when we were first married, I sure did like him a lot, but I still had my social circle and my girlfriends and … Continue reading →

The first couple of years in marriage can be a make or break time for many couples. I’ve noticed in some of the marriage discussion posts that a number of those experiencing difficulties are often in the first 2-3 year period of marriage. A couple of things occur to me in this regard. One is that marriage is a big adjustment. It’s different living with another person in a committed relationship. Suddenly you wake up every day with them and see them every evening and it puts a different complexion on the relationship. Even those who live together before marriage … Continue reading →

Recently I wrote about letting anger out. But even when angry you need some guidelines. Stop and think first of the impact of the words and the way in which they are said. Being angry doesn’t give you the right to say what you like when you like but rather, the anger needs to be tempered with common sense, wisdom, tact and awareness that sometimes it is inappropriate to vent that anger. It might just have to wait a little till a better time, till your spouse is more receptive or you are not on your way out or off … Continue reading →