In lieu of some recent events that have occurred in my family, I felt inspired to write a blog about my own relationship with my husband (I won't get into the events, anyone who is fairly close to me knows the events and that's all I am going to say about that.)  My husband and I started dating in 2003 and sometimes it feels like yesterday and other days I think about all of the events that have happened in our lives together as a couple and that's when I feel like it's been forever (and in some aspects it has been.)  When I look at young couples now (those in their late teens and early twenties, after all I am not that old myself) it's pretty easy for me to say "Just give up and move on, you can do much better" since I have never had to do this myself.  Sure, there was that two week period in my own relationship when my husband and I were dating and broke up, but two weeks in a relationship that is now over 8 years old seems like nothing.  Anyway, the topic of "break ups" got me thinking a lot about my own relationship with my husband and I am here to admit something that is pretty hard to hear but here goes: Our relationship has a lot of stress on it, and chances are it's not going to work.  Let me tell you why....

When I first met my husband I was a Junior in high school.   We had originally been introduced at a summer like camp two years prior but nothing had come of that, but we at least remembered each other when we met back up in Health class.  I was instantly attracted to his boyish looks but at the time he had a serious girlfriend and I had a fairly serious boyfriend.  We started talking back and forth in a notebook (it was basically a way to communicate during class, it was like one long note conversation) and we flirted a bit but obviously we were both dating people.  About three months into class together, within a week I found out my boyfriend at the time had been cheating on me with another girl and we broke up, while my husband hung out with an old friend of his and kissed her, thus ending his relationship as well.  Now, as a grown adult, I can see where one would say that should have been a huge red flag in my eyes but nevertheless about three weeks later, BOOM, we started dating and the rest is history.  As I mentioned before, we did have a brief breakup about two years into our relationship but it only strengthened us and we have never looked back.  My husband and I were married at 22, had our first child a year later and another child the year after that and this year we have moved so my husband could enter a career that isn't exactly marriage friendly.  So why exactly won't our relationship work?

Strike One.) Well, if you are like a lot of people, you probably believe the phrase "Once a cheater, always a cheater" and technically my husband cheated on his ex-girlfriend with a totally separate person than myself so he never cheated on me, but for the sake of the argument, this still counts.

Strike Two.) Not only did my husband cheat on his ex-girlfriend but I had just gotten out of a relationship in which I had been cheated on myself.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this probably wasn't a smart move on my part.

Strike Three.) It was merely a couple weeks between the time that both of us had broken up with different people before we started dating each other.  Now we had become fairly good friends before this but usually it's a good idea to take a little time in between relationships before jumping into another (especially since I didn't see my break up coming).

Strike Four.) My husband and I were very young when we got married (at least by today's standards since a lot of people are waiting until their 30's to get married).  Statistics will argue that people who get married young usually end up in divorce because they change a lot during their younger years and you just might start to really dislike the person you wake up next to every morning.

Strike Five.) We had our first child less than a year after getting married and had our next child 14 months later.  Not only were we in a fairly new marriage, but we added kids into the mix which usually makes relationships more complicated.

Strike Six.) After marrying young and then having both of our children, my husband received a job opportunity 400 miles away from our hometown.  We packed up everything we had and moved to a totally different state away from absolutely everyone we had ever known.  There are no family members or friends down here to help us (although my husband is slowly meeting people through work).  We are on our own in this case.

Strike Seven.) Without giving away too many details, my husbands line of work is known for it's many divorces because of the intensity of the work.  He is very committed to his job and I am completely in support of that, but nevertheless the numbers still remain there.

So, instead of three strikes, is it really seven strikes you are done?  Well, considering all of the statistics that follow each one of those strikes, I would say our chances of actually making our relationship last the test of time is about 25% (I merely guessed this, I didn't actually take the time to look into the statistical data of each strike so feel free to give me a better number if you have it).  Despite all of these strikes against my marriage, I am willing to hold onto that 25% and hope our relationship does last.  When you find that special person, you just know and my husband is that person.  It hasn't always been easy and we have been through quite a bit but there is no one else I would rather fight for.  I hope that all of you out there reading this will/have someone like that in your life that you can say the same about.  Sometimes, you just have to prove statistics wrong.  Ciao everyone!

If someone would have told me in my early teens that by the age of 25 I would be married with two small children and living 400 some miles away from where I grew up, I would have probably looked at them laughed.  Although I know no one knows exactly where their life will take them, believe me when as a teenager I had no intentions of being where I am today.  I always wanted to get married and have children, but as I started high school and became interested in the opposite sex, I found myself being more of a "friend" to most of the male population than anything more like I would have liked.  Now things are completely different and sometimes I still look around during alone time at night when everyone else is sleeping and think "what the heck happened that lead me to this place?"  The obvious answer would be this: falling in love with someone who just needed to get the heck out of where we came from, and that is exactly what has led me to my current place on the map.  My husband will tell you that when he first proposed and I said yes that I knew getting into this marriage was eventually going to lead to this.  I knew the job he was eventually hoping to snag was not going to happen in the place we had both grown up and still call "home" so it's not like this whole moving thing came as a complete and utter shock to me.  But, as time began to pass, I became more fearful about moving and of course, more emotional about the situation in general. 

My husband and I were married in 2008 and each year after brought us a new child into our life so the move became our "child" of 2011 so to speak.  Much like the anticipation and anxiousness I experienced when I was pregnant with each of my children, moving became another "waiting game", just of a different kind.  My husband applied for his job in July of 2010 and at that point it seemed like we still had plenty of time to relax and just enjoy our new small family in our hometown, but I knew deep down that once the job application process started, it wouldn't be long before we were saying our goodbyes.  Ironically (at least in my eyes), I turned 25 in July of last year which I have always looked at as being my year.  Most people growing up couldn't wait to turn 18 or 21.  I always looked forward to 25, probably because it's my favorite number and it would be the only time in my life I could exclusively use it.  It's ironic to me that I turned 25 during probably one of the hardest times of my life emotionally because I had always looked forward to turning 25 and suddenly I wanted to stop the clock and stay on my birthday (ironically so did one of my close friends that I work with but hers was for a totally different reason entirely, one that I am unsure of at the current moment).  Of course it would be foolish for me to believe I could stop time so as my 25th year of life moved on, I began to slowly accept the fact that it would be my last year in my hometown.  There wasn't a doubt in my mind that my husband would make it through the lengthy application process for his current job and that we would soon be moving farther than I would have expected ever in my life.

I am not going to lie to any of you.  This past year was probably the hardest year I have ever had in my life.  As my husband and I waited day after day for any contact from his current employer about his application status, things I knew I would be experiencing for the last time started to fall into place.  Thanksgiving came, then Christmas, then of course the New Year.  At one point I was talking with my boss at work and I told her that the wait to move kind of felt like I was waiting for something to die.  Always trying to be the positive one and trying not to let the negativeness I was feeling spill out into my workplace, I told her it was hard for me to experience the wait because I felt like I was the one that was dying but I was still excited to go and start out fresh somewhere.  I knew both sets of parents didn't want us to leave (after all, if we left that meant their grandchildren would be leaving too...) as well as people at work and friends that I had grown up with or became friends with over the years.  It was hard to hear my mom crying in my parents kitchen one night that she was going to miss us because as much as I knew I had to leave, it didn't mean I wanted to leave all of the people in my life as well.  I remember one night laying in bed talking to my husband that I felt like the two hardest parts about moving were leaving everything I had ever known to start out brand new (including the people I was having a difficult time at work with, at least that was familiar to me) as well as starting a new life somewhere else.  The place where we grew up, although pretty boring for most teenagers, at least was fairly safe and was a nice place to raise a family.  In my head, I pictured raising our children there for them to turn around and raise their children, etc, so that our families would always be close by.  I knew going into my marriage that moving was going to happen, but it's a lot harder to stomach something when it actually DOES happen that you aren't necessarily looking forward to completely in the first place.

So here I am, sitting in my new living room in my new home in a new city which I am still pretty unfamiliar with (getting out of the house with two small children just doesn't sound all that exciting to me on most days!).  Although I do miss my family and friends, I am starting to get used to the idea of being far away.  It has helped that since we have moved here my in-laws have visited twice (well the first time was to help us move) and my parents have been down here once and have plans to come again for Labor Day weekend so we haven't been short of visitors so far.  I know the visiting will slow down much like a college student who comes home every weekend his first year and slowly stops coming around as often as time progresses on but I still enjoy the phone conversations we have on a regular basis with family to keep in touch.  It will be hard when our children are a little older and they won't have their grandparents/uncles/aunts/cousins etc. around on a regular basis to see but it makes the times we do have together that much more special when they do happen.  So what's new for me as I round the corner towards my 26th birthday?  I think I will wait to discuss more of what's going on for me personally in another blog.  Ciao for now!

First and foremost, let me get a little mushy gushy here for just a few minutes (for those of you with a weak stomach to mushy and gushy, please jump to the next paragraph).  I love my husband.  There, I said it in the most basic and plain way that I possibly can.  I could write a poem or a song or throw in some loves quotes about how amazing he is or how great my life is with him, but instead I would rather just keep things simple.  We first started dating about 6.5 years ago and have been pretty much inseperable ever since.  He has been my best friend, through the good times and the bad, and somehow we have managed to fold our once seperate lives into one complete life, which now includes a little one that is ours.  I could insert a bunch of bragging about the things he has done for me and all of the times he has put up with my not so fun behavior (or just plain moodiness) but instead I would rather just talk about our relationship on the surface.  I am not the kind of person who likes to honestly sit and talk about my relationship with my husband.  I feel like the things that happen between us are for us only and I don't mean this in simply a romantic or sexual sense but rather as a whole.  I don't talk about our relationship because we don't have much of one (this is completely and utterly false) or because I am unhappy in my marriage (also very false).  Rather, I choose to omit talking about our relationship because I feel like that is part of what makes it special.  Sure, it's great to be able to tell someone "Hey my husband brough me flowers home today just because he loves me" and other random acts of kindness that have occured between us, but really I feel much safer keeping what happens between us together.  With that being said, I will go to the next paragraph and actually get to the point of this blog since it obviously isn't a blog just about me and my husband.

A good friend of mine recently wrote a blog in which she talks about "The One" and how difficult it is to wrap someone's mind around the idea of there being only "one" person for everyone in the world.  Part of me wants to stand my ground and ramble on about how ideas such as this are simply what make Halmark cards and romantic movies favorites among women (I apologize for this comment and any other comments that may stereotype or otherwise place blame on one gender over the other for the remainder of this blog).  Not to sound offensive, and trust me I am a sucker when it comes to romantic things, but honestly what are the chances that the stuff that we see in the movies would actually happen in real life.  Take one of my favorite movies of all time, She's All That.  Are there probably some instances in the world where the popular kid in school falls in love with the otherwise freak of the school.  Certainly, and I am not blind enough to think otherwise.  But the idea of this actually happening is pretty crazy.  This is just one example of many I could use to prove my point about romantic movies and how their plotlines can be farfetched but still draw the crowds of millions of women every year to have an hour and half of hopefulness that they too will find someone to fall in love with someday.  The idea of "The One" is quite popular in these movies involving two people.  The plot line usually goes something like this: Boy meets girl, boy and girl get to know each other, one makes the other one mad and they seperate and go their own way to eventually find each other in the end and fall in love and live happily ever after.  Now I realize there certainly are movies in which this does not occur (think Titanic or The Break Up).  Honestly though, when you really sit back and think about it, the chances of actually finding "The One" are against us from the start.

First of all, the geopgraphic location of someone is going to play a major role in this.  If one was truly suppose to find "The One", they would have to venture all over the globe in search of every person he/she could find.  After their search was complete would they be able to truly be able to find "The One" they felt fit all of their specific guidelines.  This idea, of course, is ridiculous.  No one in his/her right mind would actually travel the globe and simply open his/her heart to every possible person he/she met in hopes that they would be able to find "The One" for him/her.  Again, I am sure that it is possible that some person has tried to do this sometime in history but let's get serious for a minute, the idea as a whole is impossible.  Second of all, even if this idea was possible and out of all the people in the world, Person A finds Person B and decides Person B is "The One".  What if Person B did not feel the same way?  Now, as I have understood, the whole idea of "The One" is that both people agree that they have found "The One".  Halmark would probably go out of business if their cards said something like this: Roses are red, violets are blue, you believe I am the one, I wish I felt the same about you."  Fortunately for me, this would be the type of card my husband would give to me as a joke, but that's beside the point.  Finally, even if both people agreed that they had indeed found "The One" for each other, does this mean they are destined to be together for all time.  A person who truly is "The One" for another would be able to grow with that person and even if they had changed, both parties would be able to mold their lives to fit the other (since they are "The One" for the other).  But two people who marry at 18 may not be the same people who marry each other at 30.  If they met at 30 instead of at 18, would they actually still be "The One" for that person?  If my husband had remembered me in 8th grade when we were in band together, I have my doubts that he would have given me any kind of day when we actually met and fell in love in Health class only three years later.  Wouldn't this be true of any relationship?  I am barely the same person day to day, let alone years later.  If I divorced in two years, would the person I thought might be "The One" in high school come back into my life and fall in love with me, a divorced single mom with a job as a housekeeping supervisor in a hotel?  According to Hallmark and all the love quotes I have ever read, the answer is yes.  Does it sound logical?  In my eyes, as much as I don't want to admit it, no it doesn't.  Had I kept chasing after this boy that I thought I was in love with, I might have eventually dated him and yes we might have been happy but I wouldn't change the course of history for anything.

Am I a cynic when it comes to love?  Absolutely not.  I think love is a wonderful thing.  I cried during PS. I Love You, have sent numerous love quotes to my husband through email over the years and love getting roses.  In fact, one of my biggest pet peeves are people who rip apart love, especially Valentine's Day.  So what if it's a Hallmark holiday?  So what if you and your boyfriend never celebrate it?  There are no rules for the holiday, do with it as you wish.  (Okay yes that was a little off topic, but I needed to get it off my chest ).  Seriously though, I think people put too much emphasis on the idea that they HAVE to find "The One" in order to be happy for the rest of their life.  What if I think I have found "The One" now but years from now I run into a man that honestly is "The One" for me.  Does this mean I have to divorce my husband and put my kid(s) through hell because their parents aren't together anymore?  No it doesn't.  I made a choice last year when I married my husband that I would stay with him through the good times and the bad times.  This includes staying faithful in our marriage.  I am not going to just throw away our marriage over some guy who I suddenly find and think really might be "The One" because what if the "The One" decides to dump me and I am left sad and alone with no partner at all.  No one has ever said "The One" will never leave you, he/she just happens to the person you should be with.

Let's wrap up this blog now, shall we?  I think everyone is allowed to have their own opinion when it comes to love but to me there are two very important things people need to remember.  One, don't settle for something because you don't feel like you will ever find what you are looking for.  Two, don't spend so much time focused on something that you miss out on something else that could make you really happy.  I feel like these are the two biggest errors that people make in relationships.  They are either too worried and focused on something that may never be or they settle for something that really isn't for them in hopes that they can make it work.  That's all for now, thanks for reading.