Why Did You Choose Your Husband?

You ever thought why of all the candidates we end up marrying this particular person? Is it the law of attraction at work? Or the punishing power of karma? If I look 10 years back, I see what I was when I met my future husband. Scared, insecure, weak, needy and worst of all absolutely  unbearably lonely. It couldn't have gone any other way. He came - strong, manly, fearless - scooped me up, took me under his wing and shielded me from the world. Even with some obvious incompatibilities  and many differences - cultural, behavioral, intellectual - I was willing to move ahead with his strong current, the voice of reasoning too weak against my desperate desire to be protected.
 
Little did I know that his powerful, dominating personality will imprison me in a narrow cell of his limitations. That before I met him it was me against the world, and now it's me against him AND the world.  That when I was by myself I was surviving, but with him I started disappearing.
So the bitter battle began to preserve my identity and free will. To fight his every "no",  his irrational control and jealousy, his pull-push attitude where one day he would be all loving and needy, and the next - distant and despising. But worst of all was his impact on my emotional state: all the doubts and insecurities that emerged within me due to a randomly thrown comment or a straightforward insult. When I think about our first few years together, I feel utterly sorry for myself: he kept bending me in every way he wished and all I could do was cry helplessly and wait for a change in his mood to give me a break.
 
But this is not a story about my husband, he is not a bad man and he has to deal with his own demons. This is my story. Without summoning my own inner strength and cultivating self-love and self-respect, I would always be at someone's mercy - striving to please in return for approval, love, protection. If I don't know my worth and who I am, everyone will mold me to their liking. I realized that it was not about changing my husband, or finding ways to peacefully co-exist with him, or proving him the point. It was about instilling into my every cell the notion that I AM ENOUGH, that I'm everything I'm meant to be.
The past few years I worked hard to fix what was broken. But not in our relationship - inside of me. It was a slow process and I would rebound to my old ways of thinking now and then, but I was definitely changing. It started one day when I decided not to be mad at him when he deliberately tried to hurt me. I kept saying, "that's his problems and they have nothing to do with me, I know my worth". Soon enough his words or actions barely bothered me, I was ready to forget and move on within minutes. In the evening he would act all guilty, studying my reaction and then I would remember we had a fight in the morning. But being upset with him seemed too insignificant to concern myself with it.
 
Today I'm strong enough to say that the only person I will entrust with my happiness is me. I allow him to add to that happiness if he wishes, but not to subtract. Back in my single days there were other men, possibly better men, more compatible with my personality and expectations. But they scared me so much because I thought in panic - how could I ever stand up to their amasingness? I picked who I thought I deserved, who was my match at that point. Today it would have been a different story.
If you are struggling in your relationship, rather than digging up all the things that are wrong with your partner, look for answers within and see what brought this person to your life in the first place. What gaps were you trying to close? What insecurities to cover up? We often think that we need another person to feel whole, to supplement what we are lacking but we forget that we possess everything we need to navigate through life with or without a partner. I stopped asking myself - why him? Through my husband I've learned many lessons about myself and uncovered many of my own limitations.  These days I only allow him to love me. The minute he tries to control, upset or frighten me, I lose interest and retreat into my own happy world. When he opts for his mean ways, he is not compatible with me  so I simply shut him out. These days he has to play by my rules, which is really just one rule called LOVE.
 

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Problems exist in every marriage. So do their solutions.