The Saga of Our Love

Often times we wonder how such a strong romance filled with passion and laughter could start to spiral downward and lose its spark. As I sit outside by myself and think about my marriage, I wonder how we went from being so happy, so in love, so passionate to constantly arguing, sleeping in separate rooms, and little to know intimacy. Our story is one that truly is an epic romance, so how have we gotten to this point, where we can barely be in the same room without emotions bubbling over and an argument ensuing? It's hard to put my finger on what caused such a disconnect between him and I. He seems like a different person, someone who is quick to blame, quick to lose his temper. That was never the man I knew, not even a year ago when we finally decided to stop lying to ourselves and get hitched. It's difficult to have a conversation with him, I can't oppose his view otherwise he tends to become dismissive and just walk away from me. No matter how hard I try, it seems like he is just always annoyed or frustrated with me. I feel my heart slowly breaking as I spiral into a depression, always feeling alone in a place where I have no one but him and he isn't there for me. My husband is in the military so when we got married I had to move to a new state, leaving my family, friends, and only home I've ever known behind. I didn't mind. I was happy to be moving across the country. I was going to be with the one man that I had ever actually loved in my life and he was going to be my family and my best friend. Long distance friendships are hard, especially once you're an adult and everyone is "too busy" to text you back. He knew I would be heavily relying on him to help me maintain sanity with my lack of a social network when we got settled in. He did do a great job at first, introducing me to his coworkers' wives so that I knew some other females in the area. Moving wasn't all that bad as far as my career goes either, I actually got an incredible job, one that pays exponentially more than my previous employer. Everything seemed to be positive and better now that we were together and married and living in our house. I guess I may have just been too optimistic. The trouble first started when, shortly after I had gotten settled in, our s*x life started to dwindle to nothing. Maybe I was naive to think that the "honeymoon stage" of a marriage was a real thing or was something that lasted longer than a couple of months. I am a hopeless romantic and I am a huge advocate for small gestures to make your spouse feel special and important and appreciated. Silly me for assuming that getting flowers once in a while from your husband was a crazy expectation. Eventually I started feeling like we were more roommates, he would go watch TV in our bedroom and I'd be in the living room. Cuddling together and watching a movie wasn't really a thing anymore, not like it used to be. Sex...laughable. I had been asking him for months to take me to a desolate area at night so we could look up at the sky and lay underneath the blanket of stars. We're from Chicago, so the light pollution makes it nearly impossible to see much of the night sky. Now that we live in a rural area of Texas with little to no light pollution, all I have been begging for is that one romantic date. We have been living here for a little over a year and still I have not gotten my wish. So as I am sitting outside alone, with nothing but time to get lost within my thoughts, I sit and I wonder. Really, in order to get to any sort of sliver of a conclusion, I need to go back in time and start at our beginning. 11 years ago. OK, I may have to actually go slightly further than that only because there are some small details about me that you should know, and being that I'm 1 year older than my husband our story actually starts before the day we met. I am sick of being alone and I want to pinpoint the exact second that something changed. I want my husband back, or I need to be able to walk away in order to regain my happiness before I fully dive head-first down a hole of unhappiness, depression, hopelessness, and resentment from which I cannot return. I need to go back and figure out what I can do to save our future. As I sit back in my chair and close my eyes, I start my meditation exercise. I slowly drift into a state of relaxation as I listen to the breeze calmly push through the tree branches. I open my eyes and realize that it worked. I was standing in my own body, but my 14 year old body. The year was 2011.