Sometimes Love is Not Enough

I fell in love when I was just a kid in high school, still full of dreams of my own happily ever after. I believed that love alone would carry us through every problem and circumstance. I married my first love less than a year after graduation. Little did I know that we were both in the midst of life-altering changes. For him, it was the beginning of his career with the U.S. Air Force. For me, I was preparing for the birth of our first child. During our time apart (while he was in basic training and technical school), we wrote to each other nearly every day. There was no denying that we loved each other. But sometimes time apart makes people grow apart, even if it is only a little in the beginning.

Shortly after our daughter was born, we relocated to Omaha, Nebraska and lived in military housing. MORE BIG CHANGES. They don't tell you that when your spouse joins the military, you might as well have signed up too. Here I was, spending most of the day learning how to take care of a child and live up the expectation of a dutiful military wife and mother. I didn't even know how to be an adult yet, let alone live up to that! But, I did everything I could. The rules we had to live by seemed endless, especially for two 18-year-olds, but we tried to make it work because we loved each other. 

A couple years of later, our relationship began to feel less like a marriage and more like roommates in passing. He was working one shift, while I was working another. More and more problems kept coming our way. Instead of talking through them, we ignored or argued about them. We were less often on the same page about the big issues in our life. In the end, our marriage failed for a million reasons. Not because we didn't love each other, but because we didn't communicate effectively or continuously work at our relationship. The little problems that went without repair soon became the elephant in the room. We didn't have the same goals or values anymore. We were kids trying to play house without the adult tools necessary to tackle the big stuff of life. We had started down different paths early on, and once that happens, there's no turning back. It's easy to see that now.

Love requires continuous work. You cannot expect that once you "fall in love" -- that's it, no more work. It takes effort. You have to be willing to give and take in all the responsibilities there are, from the most important (like raising children) to the silly or mundane (like taking out the trash). You have to brainstorm how to overcome issues as they arise. You have to really tune into your mate and HEAR what they are saying, but also what they are NOT saying. You have to be honest and open (sometimes the biggest lies are those of omission), but you also have to have a sense of humor about life, because it will not always be easy. You have to love your mate with all your heart, but also truly like them too. You have to be willing to make sacrifices when its necessary. You cannot always have your way, and neither can the other person. It takes partnership of epic proportions, which is why so many relationships come to an end. I was truly fortunate to have found love again a few years ago, but I see things very differently than I did at 16. Sometimes love is simply NOT enough...it takes WAY more than that to develop a long-lasting, happy relationship.