Vixen Manual - Karrine Steffans [105]
Think about it. In all your imaginings of what it would be like to be married when you were that dreamy-eyed young girl, did you ever picture what it would be like to celebrate your fiftieth anniversary, and did the thought of it make you excited? No? What about the hard times that lie ahead? Did you ever daydream about those? What about mortgages, IRAs, life insurance, child-care costs, episiotomies, the inevitable moments of marital doldrums? Did you ever consider any of it? No? Then you should, because it’s all very real, very common, and definitely not the stuff that fluffy, star-spangled fantasies are made of. It’s a classic case of setting yourself up for failure. You know what you’ll be wearing when you walk down the aisle, but what will you be wearing when your marriage is boggled by financial, family, and emotional woes? Who will have the beef and the chicken then? Who will be sitting where?
Marriage isn’t about place settings and taffeta, exotic locales, and perfectly posed photographs. We plan for the fairy tale but not for the “happily ever after” and what it may or may not entail, because in those storybooks we read as little girls the last words were always just happily ever after. No explanation or plan was included. We didn’t know happily ever after could mean “but sometimes really boring and not always liking each other.” There was never any talk of the sacrifices and the pangs that might come in your marriage to Prince Charming. There was no solution offered to his death rattle of a snore or how to deal with his unbearable bitch of a mother, Queen Not-So-Charming. Nope, ladies, no one ever explained to us how in the hell we were supposed to be fucking happy for the rest of our goddamned lives!
As a result, you end up failing. You never stood a chance since all you were focused on was the dream.
So, you had a husband and now you don’t. Or maybe you almost had a husband and now you’re alone. All because we modeled our lives based on Barbies and Kens, Sleeping Beauties, Rapunzels, Cinderellas, and all the other absurd, fictitious characters who got fed potions, were shoved in ovens, kissed frogs, or had a man scale their five-hundred-foot-long hair to take them away to a life of implied-but-unexplained bliss. We bought the farm, girls. We fell for the okey-doke.
Guess what, though? We don’t have to keep buying in to this silliness. Let’s take this time together to journey back into your dating and marital past, through all those relationships that never were or almost made it, and let’s find the one thing every single one of these relationships had in common—you. At some point, we have to stop blaming the men in our lives for our relationship failures and take a good, hard, excruciating look at our bad habits, our shortcomings, and the possible reasons for our being unable to ever stay on the road to “happily ever after,” even if it somehow managed to find itself under our feet.
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Vixen Tip
As a couple, take the time to conjure up a five-year plan. Whether before or after you are married, seek out books at your local bookstore about getting married like 1,001 Questions to Ask Before You Get Married by Monica Mendez Leahy. These books pose pertinent questions for the both of you to answer and face about your relationship and future together. Make plans for your family’s financial and educational goals. Don’t forget about the emotional goals as well; decide what your household will be defined by and where you see yourselves and your family in the next five years. Facing the tough questions early in a relationship or marriage is the only way to know