I had a good chat with someone I haven’t spoken to in a while this afternoon and found out that she had actually left her husband after about five to six years of marriage.
One of the things she had told me was that she was constantly unhappy with him for all manners of things. They were small things but they all added up and one day, it just hit her that hey, she hasn’t been happy for a really long time.
“But it didn’t occur to me that there was a problem for a long while,” she said, “Because my parents are divorced and spend a lot of their lives being unhappy with each other. I thought that’s how a marriage is, that married people are supposed to be constantly unhappy with each other.”
I remember attending her wedding at Villa Bali so many years back and her (then) boss walking her down the aisle because her (still) estranged parents couldn’t agree to attend the wedding together.
Looking at my own marriage, I don’t think I’ve ever been seriously annoyed or unhappy with The Other Half ever in all of our time together. When we are upset with each other, we exchange words, and then the moment passes and we just get on with the programme.
So while I gear up to do my three reunion dinners this Chinese New Year, I shall remind myself not to take this happiness, this contentment for granted, to work at giving the children a positive impression of relationships to take with them into the future.
