What a privilege it is to afford a gym, buy healthy food, pay bills, have legs that walk, eyes that see, a brain that functions, work every day, and take our bodies to their full potential.
One day your child will sit across from someone and explain to them what it was like to be raised by you. Make sure it’s a story worth telling.
Read it again.
Before they cheated, they considered the risk of losing you, the risk of you finding out, the pain it would cause… and they still decided it was worth it. That’s the hardest part to forgive.
When I first got married, I called my mom to complain about some argument my husband and I were having. My mom stopped me right there and said, "unless you are in danger, dont ever let anyone into your marriage, not even me". Its was the best advice I could've ever received as a young wife. It allowed me to take my concerns directly to my husband, think thru how I really feel without someone projecting themselves on me. Gatekeep the marriage.
My fiancée and I got engaged a year ago, and our relationship has been so much better since then.
Materially, nothing’s really changed. We already lived together, shared a credit card, had group chats with each other’s families...
But getting engaged led to a mindset shift. We stopped evaluating each other (e.g., are they the right person for me?) and got to work building the best life possible with our relationship as a given. And that has been incredibly freeing.
For example, I’m convinced that a lot of our past conflicts were just uncertainty in disguise. When we'd fight, it wasn't actually just, “we disagree, let's resolve this issue." There was unspoken subtext: “Is this disagreement a dealbreaker? Do I need to put up with this? Would life be easier with someone else?"
Since getting engaged, we resolve conflict so much faster. We skip the “does this mean we’re incompatible?” step and jump straight to “how can we solve this as quickly as possible?”
Another huge positive is that thinking about our future has become way more fun. We’re fully a team now, and we can plan and dream together: her future is mine, and mine is hers.
The point I want to emphasize is that the only thing that changed about our relationship was our commitment to it. But that was all it took!
Things don’t need to be perfect first. Commit to something, and by doing so, you make it great.
When i was younger i thought Rihanna had actually killed some people and it didn’t help when I saw the Man Down video. I thought she was a criminal at large and nobody cared because she was sexy and cool.