Prologue
To be fair, it’s not like I had a healthy representation of what a relationship was supposed to look like. Coming from a broken home and broken family since before I could even remember, well to be fair before my first birthday. All I had known as a young child was to try to play mediator between an angry father and an angry mother and two indifferent step parents to me. Love, by all accounts, looked boring. Some might have called it stability, but in any case to me, it looked suffocating. I can remember being young, not quite even in my teens, and my mother telling me that the best thing I could do was to find a rich man to marry. That, apparently, was the key to a “good life”. My father on the other hand truly only wanted me to be happy. Yet even within his own marriage, I could tell that he himself hadn’t experienced what he wished for me. Maybe he had once, but I had never been witness to it.
So as I sat on my couch, looking at my life and my relationship, it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination why my mind was toiling, conflicted, and a dark cloud of emotions. Completely unable to understand within myself what I was feeling or why and how it all manifested in my day-to-day life with my husband.
