Do you ever wish marriage came with an instruction manual? A guide on how to navigate any problems you may have? A solution to the relationship issues you are suffering?

What do you do when things aren’t perfect? When you have differences that you’re not sure you will ever resolve.

Do you communicate, compromise and work at it? or do you walk away?

Fight, or flight?

I love The Essex Husband with ever fibre of my being. He is an amazing father, a hard-working provider and damn good at the washing up.  He makes me laugh, he holds me up if I have one to many glasses of wine and I ALWAYS still get goosebumps when he kisses me.

We have a very lovely life.

However there is one thing that hangs over us like a dark cloud.  I wont go into too much detail about it on here as it involves others family members and I have to respect their privacy (it’s at times like this I wish I was an anonymous blogger), but its something that will never go away and something that will always leave me feeling upset and let down. It’s not life changing, but big enough to provoke conversations that include us discussing our future and evoke worry that this may be the one thing that comes between us.

So what do we do? Ignore it? Talk about it? Shout? Scream? Walk away if things get tough?

Firstly we ignored it, hoping it would just go away. It didn’t. I got angry, in a passive aggressive way, and began to fill with resentment. It was not a healthy way to live and it was destroying us. Something had to change.

Now I’m as stubborn as the day is long. I said ’till death us do part’ and I will achieve that or die trying. I will never give up on my marriage.  While the lines of communication are open, and while both parties are willing to try, I continually strive to work though whatever life may have recently thrown in our direction.

We have talked about the issue in hand. I have seen his side of the argument and he has listened to why I feel so let down.  No one is right, no one is wrong.  It’s just the way the cookie crumbles at times.  Life isn’t always like a plot for a love story. Sometimes life is a little bit shit.

A common ground has been found, a compromise made and a great example set to our children on how things take work to succeed.

We live in such an ‘instant’ society and, in many ways, that is a fantastic thing, but at times things feel all a bit to disposable for my liking. It’s so easy to say ‘I’ve had enough’ and move on to something new. If something is broke you but a new one, if something is damaged you exchange it. It makes me uncomfortable.

Like many things in life, marriage is something that takes an effort to keep alive.  Its a full-time job.  It needs time invested into it. It has to be worked at.

That is what we have done. We have invested our time and our emotions into navigating our through this bad patch. We have worked at our marriage in order to keep it alive. We have found a way come together and use a negative to make us stronger.

I think we have done ourselves proud.

I love you Langers.