Clearly Tiger missed this hit last year:
I feel sorry for Elin. And I don’t condone any abuse against anybody.
But, I understand.
If Mr. SLS gets crazy and decides to wander, in the words of Miss Sophia from “The Color Purple,” I will bash his head open and think about heaven later. KNOW THIS! Cause he does.
I have a friend who has hit a rough patch in her marriage. I feel certain that they will work their way through it, but I’m watching how they get through so that I can learn ways to navigate us through trouble if/when it comes.
My parents argued a lot. Yelling and screaming and door slamming and all types of dramatics. Nobody bit their tongue and they would say anything to each other. I was glad when they split because it was finally peaceful.
But (and parents, take note of this) what I learned from them, I modeled in my relationships. I would say anything cause my perception was that if you’re a man you can and will take it. Man up biyatch!
I don’t do that now. Mr. SLS and I talk about a lot of stuff to try to keep things from festering. We’ve agreed that we will seek counseling if we need to in the future.
It hasn’t been hard not to fight dirty. Mr. SLS doesn’t do much that makes me 198 degrees hot enough to fly off the handle and talk greasy.
I know that I don’t want the kind of marriage my parents had. They were ill-matched and their marriage collapsed. I want to be and stay happily married. That takes work and conscious effort.
My friend has a strong marriage and that’s why I have no doubts they will get reconnected. In the interim I’ll just watch, take notes and learn.
There are a few times when I try to do something and it seems too hard and I can’t focus on it or push forward. Maybe the timing is off, or something but whatever it’s not right, so I put a pin in it and step away.
That’s the situation with my house. Up until now it seemed like I could not do what needed to be done to get this house sold or rented. Something was always distracting or blocking me. So, I left it alone. Yes, that meant I was spending money for a place no one was living in, but I could not get over the hump.
I’ll admit that I think part of it was being a new bride and still growing in my marriage.
Getting to a point where in the back of my head I don’t need to cling to my house as the last vestige of my independent womanhood.
Even as much as I trust(ed) Mr. SLS and know that he is a great man who loves me, that still didn’t make me stop being ME. Meaning I trust but verify. In ALL situations.
Thankfully my husband understands me and is patient.
Anyway as far as taking care of my house, things are flowing now.
Agent is on the job, paperwork is moving along as needed.
The pieces are falling in the place.
The timing is right.
Right?
Yeah, I’ve been away from the blog for a bit. This thing can be a grind and with Facebook and Twitter accounts to play with, too, that’s an overabundance of Interwebz going on sometimes, so I have to scale it back before I’m a crazy person who stares at a computer 24-hours a day.
Mr. SLS has been gone for almost two weeks and it’s actually been cool. We’ve had more funny phone conversations than usual which is a trip. I miss him, but it’s been nice being alone, too. I’ve done some drinking and hanging out with the girls and I might go catch the Harry Potter movie tonight.
In any case, here’s something I made last night while I was bored. I got the idea from CreoleInDC who makes these using conversations with her husband. This is loosely based on a conversation Mr. SLS and I had yesterday.
NOTE: A mouse ran out from under the bed in the middle of the night last week scaring me to death.
My cousin Chris, the one who is like the big brother I never had, is getting divorced.
When he brought his soon-to-be ex-wife around 12 years ago, I’ll admit I preferred this other woman he was seeing that I had befriended. His other girl was really cool, pretty, smart and we were in the same sorority.
But my cousin told me he preferred the woman who would later become his wife. So, I left it alone. He loved her and it was his choice — and life — at the end of the day.
Until the other day, I’ve never been rude to his wife. In fact, I went out of my way to be nice and friendly to her because not one other person in our family liked her or wanted him to marry her. And when my family decides not to like you, they will make your life hard indeed. I figured until she did something to me or hurt my cousin, it was all good.
Why does my family hate her so? She lied. All the time. About everything. First, she said her kids (she had two when he met her) had the same father. That turned out to be a lie. She said she had been married before and had left her husband. Lie. She told me she went to college and pledged a different sorority than the one I am a member of. Lie. If she was talking she was lying.
While they were dating Grandma invited her to an event and she wore the shortest, tackiest, sluttiest dress for miles around embarrassing our grandmother. After she bent over one time too many my Grandma said, “Everyone here is dressed like a lady except you. Go put some clothes on cause I’m tired of seeing the top of your ass crack every time you bend over.”
I’m sure there are good things about her, too, I just can’t think of any of them.
Now, after almost 10 years of marriage, this couple is done-zo. She found a new man and decided she didn’t want to be married anymore. When my cousin told me about the pending divorce, we had a good long talk about relationships etc. No matter what *we* saw, he loved his wife, lumps, bumps, lies and all.
When she called me Sunday asking for something — I don’t know what, cause I cut her short — I was rude to her. I’m wrong for that. In our whole family, I am the *one* person who has been consistently nice to her, so whatever she needed, I’m prolly the only one she could ask.
BUT TOO DAMN BAD CAUSE THAT WENCH DUMPED MY COUSIN FOR ANOTHER MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, I know I’m going to hell.
I realize I never told you what my birthday surprise was! It was tickets to this: Revived ‘Ragtime,’ Bursting With Energy & Ingenuity.
This was a great surprise because a couple of months ago I had mentioned reading the book several years earlier and we had a long conversation about the story and the characters in it. Mr. SLS remembered that and when he saw the show was coming to town and opened on my birthday, he snatched up two tickets.
I had a great time and was reminded how much I appreciate my husband who *listens* to me.
I tell Mr. SLS I love him all of the time. For example, I might yell down the stairs “I LOVE YOU!” randomly just because I felt it. It’s real freeing for me to be able to express myself and have it reciprocated. He’s the only person I am like that with or have ever been like that with.
In past relationships it was hard for me to say those words. Even with my parents. When we get off the phone and they say they love me it seems…odd. And it’s because they didn’t say that to me when I was growing up. I realize that as I have grown up they have grown as people and part of that is trying to have a different relationship with me, including telling me that they love me and hugging me and generally trying to be more expressive about their love for me. It’s still weird to me though.
It’s never seemed weird to hear Mr. SLS tell me he loved me. When he told me the first time, I said, “I know. I love you too.” Cause I did know before he told me how he felt about me. Just like I know my parents love me. But the dynamics of our relationship from early on was not a “loving” one, it was very “I am the parent, you are the child, do as I say, not as I do.”
That’s why I love the way my husband loves me. The way he always kisses me when he leaves in the morning and hugs me when I get home in the evening and asks how my day was.
For the past three days I have barely seen him because he’s been working a long three day gig, leaving before I woke up and not getting home until after I was asleep. But he called to tell me he missed me. That was the best thing ever.
I can’t wait until he gets home so I can tell him I love him.
Do they know it or is it all in your head?
I love to see Mr. SLS in his Army gear, for whatever reason it’s real sexy to me.
On Sunday he came in with his gear on looking all luscious and hawt and sexy (to me). He started talking to me while leaning in the doorway unzipping his jacket and for about 5 minutes I just zoned out on what he was saying because it was like it was a slow motion soldier boy nudie bootie video with this undressing thing. He may as well have been licking his lips all LL Cool J-style, you know?
Then for whatever reason I snapped to and burst out laughing and he was like what? I explained how I hadn’t heard a damn thing he just said cause I was way too focused on him and the undressing.
teehee
It took awhile but we’ve finally developed a system that seems to work for us and that is transparent for the most part. On the first of the month I go through and schedule payments for all of the bills. Then I let him know I did it. I keep it all in a spreadsheet and track our spending, savings, investments etc.
Until we came up with this structure it worried me that we weren’t taking full advantage of our DINK status and were paying separately for things we could get cheaper together. I was right in some cases — car insurance, cell phones etc. — and we have combined those and increased our monthly savings.
I would say that not having school loans (and even as old as we are I have friends who are *still* paying back school loans) or car payments and buying homes before the boom were some of the best financial decisions both of us could have made.
What’s still amazing to me as we look around casually for a house we can buy together, is that the prices in D.C. (the city proper, we have no interest in moving to the suburbs and commuting in to our jobs) are still ridiculous. And trust me, we’re not looking for a mcmansion or anything like that.
Anyway, how do you other couples handle bills and expenses?
Chorus