Elle Rey📚

           Well, what can I say? It’s been an emotional month. I actually didn’t expect to feel as many emotions as I have been feeling lately. I felt like I’ve been mourning my marriage a year before any decision was made, and I thought by this time I would be all cried out. Maybe I cried about the change in the other person, as I watched him transform into a person that I didn’t know or recognize at all. And now I’m crying for the young woman who went into this marriage believing that we would go the distance. Once the decision is officially made you start to get flashbacks of the beginning and the beautiful moments you once shared with them. You remember the feeling of the wedding day and the honeymoon, and then you look at what it all turned into. It’s like a complete 180.

          When I was probably 20 years old, I started to become cautious of marriage. I had a fear of marriage because it didn’t seem to have a good success rate. Even though I had a phenomenal example of what a great marriage looked like, I still was aware of the reality outside of my household. In other words, my parents may have been blessed with an amazing marriage, but the majority of the other married couples around me showed something completely different. I looked at my parents’ marriage as a unicorn marriage (as in long happy marriage through and through). It felt like out of the 50% of marriages that didn’t end in divorce, only 10% (or lower) were actually happy. It seemed like someone was always getting cheated on or abused physically or emotionally. I didn’t know if it was possible to beat those odds and become one of those unicorn couples. So, I was hesitant, but eventually I took the leap. We seemed to fit, and it was like we were attached to the hip. We were in our own little world and there was a lot of love and laughter… until there wasn’t.

          During this process of going through the motions, I started to blame myself. There were signs and fears that I had before saying I Do, but in your twenties, you just feel like things will work itself out. I can honestly say that everything that I feared or had a gut feeling about ended up being accurate. All the concerns that I would ponder again and again were definitely for a reason. I wondered if I was foolish for ignoring those concerns, but maybe I just thought love was really enough to carry us through. If you’re in your twenties and you have any type of concerns weighing on you before the wedding, don’t ignore them.

Here are some questions you might want to ask yourself before marrying someone: Does this person make me feel safe? (Am I safe to express my emotions?) Does this person value me as a person or do they only value what I could do for them? Does this person place most of my value on my appearance? If I moved across the world with this person and didn’t have family or friends around, what would life look like? Do we have good communication with one another? Do your morals align with each other’s? Do your love languages line up? (The way you give love, and the way you receive it. Example: Your love language might be Quality Time, and his/her love language might be Acts of Service. If He/She doesn’t like to spend quality time, or if you don’t like showing acts of service then that might be a problem in the long run. If your love language is Physical Touch and you’re with someone who’s not affectionate at all it will not work. You will always be longing for something. That goes for any of the 5 love languages.)

          I just want to add that this doesn’t make me feel like marriage isn’t worth it. I will always believe that LOVE is a beautiful gift. I think it’s something that everyone should experience at least once. It may have ended in a lot of pain for me throughout my life, but I will say that the feeling of it is one of the most exhilarating feelings. I can’t say that I will do it again, but as of this moment I can say that I don’t regret it. I was true to my heart.