🎵Love and Marriage...Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage🎵

First of all, if you don't know the song lyrics of the title, then you are not old enough to read my blog. Go find yourself immersed in someone else's thoughts. 🤣 For those of you who can sing the whole theme song music, stay and immerse yourself in my thoughts.

I know people have been waiting for me to write about my relationship. I’ve been toiling over where even to start… I suppose that happens when I’ve been in the most complex relationship I’ve ever experienced in this life.

There are many types of relationships and that in itself is complex. I like this chart below because it captures what I think about when I reflect on the complexities of relationships.

https://open.lib.umn.edu/communication/chapter/7-1-foundations-of-relationships/

I’ve always thought my romantic relationships were much more complex than my other ones because I had to learn to love the person I'm volunteering to be in a partnership with. I've never experienced the “love at first sight” type of love. Certainly “lust at first sight”, but that doesn’t fully encompass the voluntary and personal relationship two people must build together every day if they want to move in an upward trajectory (which is subjective itself because who really determines what upward trajectory is or looks like? I digress.).

When I think about my present relationship, the first thing that comes to mind is “ebb and flow”. We have really great times together…and we have really difficult times together. It’s truly a balance of the two. We love each other (love is subjective too), but for years, we walked together side by side and concurrently did our own thing. We’re astrologically set up to tread our own paths and did just that until our Capricorn baby solidified our relational collision. Then, we had to MERGE our ideas of how to rear a child and maintain our relationship, which was quite explosive. It was also the stress of adding a human to our relationship because…WHEW! I don’t care what anyone says, you can lose each other in a New York minute when you’re trying to be the best MAMA you can be. These kids don’t come with instruction manuals… I’ll talk about that in #whenmalloryparents.

When I posted on social media about our decision to divorce in 2020, I had quite a few people asking me for relationship advice in my FB Inbox and IG DMs. I don’t have all the answers to life because I’m still trying to figure this SHIT out. <There’s no better word to describe adulting.

Nevertheless, I’m more than willing to help in any way possible, including sharing my experiences in this relationship and about life. Figuratively speaking about life, I feel like I was thrown into the ocean and told I need to swim to save my life. I wish I had anecdotes from my elders about how they navigated through their romantic relationships. Even the disclosures about stumbling through and falling would have been helpful. Unfortunately, I believe many of them wander aimlessly through the relational trauma they’ve experienced, both voluntary and involuntary, and have not yet healed from… and it’s too painful to speak about.

So for the ones coming up behind me, this section of my blog is dedicated to those who want this romantic relationship life (whatever it looks like) and want to hear this one’s perspective of the joys and pitfalls of it all.

While talking before going to sleep and after I wrote this thought, I asked my partner what he thought I should ask Alexa to play, and he said,

"Alexa, play "I Believe In You and Me" by Whitney Houston."

And then I sang it to him as I laid on his chest. And he sang with me.

It's those moments that make the hard moments somewhat bearable.

Picture of us tandem kayaking in Lovers Key State Park in Florida. Our first trip after our relationship reconciliation. We never thought tandem kayaking would become the biggest test of our relationship...but it was. 🤣