Today is my ninth wedding anniversary. 

The day we got married feels like a lifetime ago and yesterday all at the same time. Time is slippery like that.

To celebrate this day, we’re gonna take the kids to the spot we got married overlooking Casco Bay in Maine, which is where we always go on our anniversary.

We’re gonna recall our vows and see if we need any sort of recommitment, updates, or new ones.

We’re gonna eat oysters right out of the sea off a concrete bar custom designed with a channel for the most perfectly shaped pebbled ice, the remnants of which drain away seamlessly under the bar when it melts.

Then next week, on our very first vacation of more than 3 days without the kids that’s not tied to someone else’s wedding or a business trip, we’re doing a ceremony to usher in the next chapter of our life together.

I’ve learned buckets full of things since being married, but today I’m sharing my top 9 lessons from 9 years of being married.

“It’s not love that keeps people together. It’s fun.”

When I first heard Mama Gena say this, I didn’t really know what she was talking about because I was a twenty-something flitting around NYC having dating adventures. But 9 years into marriage and 12 years into my relationship with Mike, I can vouch for it. Love gets it going. Fun keeps it going.

Our feelings are not each other’s responsibility.

Sometimes something Mike does triggers me. That trigger very rarely has much to do with him if I dig a little deeper. The sooner I can go inside myself, regulate myself, and touch in with the actual source of the trigger (99% of the time it’s something that happened in my childhood), the sooner I can take responsibility for it. It doesn’t mean Mike gets to do or say hurtful things (or that I do), it just means that my feelings are my job, not his. And his are his job.

The only way to receive Mike’s support is to first allow myself to feel supported.

I used to have a huge support-sized hole in my heart. No matter what Mike did, I didn’t feel supported. I was seeing our whole life through the lens of having felt unsupported from a very young age. He couldn’t win. When I worked on feeling supported by the Great Father, the Great Mother, God, my body, the Earth, and myself, however, I started to be able to receive all the incredible support he’d been offering me the whole time. I also started to be able to receive it from a lot of other places in my life.

The marriage needs to come before parenting.

Our marriage comes before our kids. Some people may take issue with me saying that, but what I know is this: if Mike and I have a solid, loving, healthy relationship, our kids are being imprinted with what healthy love looks like. Their nervous systems will be healthier as a result. (BTW I think it’s totally possible for kids to have a healthy love imprint even in families of divorce. Watching both of my parents fall in love with other people and also be kind to each other after they split up was really healing for me.) It’s not like we neglect our kids to pour into our marriage, but we do make sure we invest in it in a variety of ways and we don’t let parenting become an excuse not to do so.

Our nervous systems are the key to the success of our marriage.

The more I heal my nervous system, the better wife I am. I feel safer and therefore more available to pleasure, romance, and feeling sexy. I feel more connected to Mike, less likely to be triggered (and when I am, I can find myself again more quickly) and I feel more present. When I’m in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, I can’t feel connected to the man I love. This is a work in progress, for sure, but I know it’s critical to our relationship.

Sometimes it’s gonna suck. That doesn’t mean it’s not gonna work out.

The media really paints the fairy tale picture that after the wedding, everything is perfect. Anyone who’s married knows that’s obviously not the case. Sometimes in the early days I would succumb to the brainwashing and think that if we’d hit a rough patch, it meant our marriage was doomed. Now I know that sometimes it’s just gonna be hard, and that’s just part of the deal. Often the hard moments also lead to a big uplevel in our connection and joy, so there’s that!

Anger doesn’t mean someone is gonna leave.

My parents never fought. And then when they did they got divorced. I used to get really scared when Mike would get angry because I though that meant he was going to leave. Now I know that part of a healthy relationship is sometimes getting angry and fighting. In fact, embracing my own anger has done wonders for my own emotional health and it’s been really good for our sex life because it turns out, at least for me, unexpressed anger can really can suppress turn on. Who knew?

The more I let myself expand, the better it is for our relationship. (Same goes for Mike, of course.)

Shrinking ourselves has never helped anyone. Ever. It may appear that playing small is better for someone else, but in the end when we shrink, they shrink. At the level that we’re all interconnected, our expansion is for ourselves, but it’s also on behalf of others. The more I push my own edges and evolve, the better it is for Mike. The more he transforms, the better it is for me. And of course, our relationship by default. Plus, it keeps it interesting.

Novelty is key.

Esther Perel says that the ingredients for erotic charge are mystery, obstacles, adventure, and naughtiness. All that to say, we gotta change things up in order to keep them alive. Not just in the bedroom, but in our whole lives! In fact, the more novelty we bring into our entire life, the more polarity their tends to be in our marriage. 

No matter if you’re single or been married for 90 years, I hope there was something in my 9 lessons that resonated with you and/or was helpful.

It certainly felt good to write and reflect, so thanks for coming along on the ride with me.

No matter how long our relationships last (because not all of them are meant to last forever) may they open our hearts and help us live more closely with the truth of who we are.

All my love,
Kate