Relationships Are Hard Work
Oh what to do…
It seems like lately Hubby and I have become the poster relationship for all of our newly married friends. We get bombarded with questions about how we’ve kept our relationship so strong at such a young age.
To me, I don’t feel like we were extremely young when we got married because around here most girls are either knocked up and married or running off to get married to escape this place right out of high school. I was 1 1/2 months shy of 22 when I got married, and I do see how a lot of people in this day and age thing that’s young.
Anywho, now most of our close friends are in the 24-30 range and either newlyweds or are about to get married…and every single one of them think they should come to us for advice. Your husband got mad because you bought the wrong kind of soap? What would Jenn do? Your wife caught you looking at a porno mag? What would Ben do?
Hubby and I have never really had to deal with hardships in our relationship. We’ve had our ups and downs, but I guess I could say we’re lucky. We’re completely 100% honest with each other, communicate about everything, neither of us have any sort of insecurity/jealousy issues, and we just live our lives. If we have a rocky patch, we do what we have to do to get past it. We might have a knock down drag out fight, and the next day forget it ever happened, but we’ve never gone through anything either of us consider to be an extremely tough time in our marriage. Heck, we’ve been married 5 years, and even though a lot of our friends say that’s like a lifetime with the divorce rates of today, we both feel like we’re still practically newlyweds.
So back to the questions. Most of it is silly little stuff, but now we’ve got a friend who has been asking me what seriously could be relationship ending questions for the past few days now. I understand he and his wife haven’t even hit that 6 month mark yet, and I understand he’s really got a lot to learn about women and marriages. I also know this falls into a gray area for me.
He keeps asking me to give him a woman’s perspective on their issue. I could totally give him a woman’s perspective, but it definitely wouldn’t be his wife’s perspective. I completely disagree with her 100%, but I can’t tell him that. I can’t tell him I think she’s acting childish, immature, like a total bitch. They’ve got to learn to deal with these things themselves. Yes, they’re going to fight over stupid shit. Yes, they’re going to completely disagree and piss each other off. Yes, she might be acting stupid in my opinion, but she fully believes she’s in the right. She’s a completely different person than me, and I can’t judge her just because we don’t see things from the same perspective.
No, I can’t tell him what to do.
I’ve been friends with this guy for years, and I really don’t know his wife. They live on the other side of the country, and I’ve never physically met her. I’ve talked to her online a handful of times, but I don’t know anything about her. Any advice I gave him would be totally biased, and I just can’t do that.
I gave him the best answer I thought I could give…I can listen to you, give you an out to release your frustrations, but I can’t give you advice on this. If you want advice, I think you need to discuss that with a professional. Sit her down, talk to her about it, and if you two can’t resolve your problems by communicating with each other like adults, maybe you should find someone, a professional, to talk to.
I think that was the best answer I could have given him. What would you have done?
