By Julie Harrington 
I have thrown out the word divorce more than I care to admit in my rollercoaster marriage. A marriage that was never in a good place fully. I mean did we have great times? Yes, we did. Did we connect on some levels? Yes, we did.
We had many bumps and some major mountains that have tested our marriage.
We have always been two very different people. I am the emotional, spontaneous dreamer who is always looking for more out of life. He is the laid-back, passive, set in his ways kind of guy. Don’t get me wrong, we balance each other out so well.
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See my husband is not a great communicator. He was raised to keep his feelings inside, do what he was told, and just keep the peace. Our fights were me crying, yelling, trying to reach him to truly understand what I needed from life, from him, from our marriage.
Unfortunately, no matter how much I shared with him or how many fights we had over the same things, I never felt like he was getting it.
As the years went by raising three children, him working outside the home while I maintained the house, the bills, the kids, a home business, and struggling with my own demons, we got into such a rut that I stopped caring. I stopped trying to connect. We would fight. I would share my feelings, how I felt, and it was like talking to a wall.
The only way I could finally be happy was to ask for a divorce. A real one. Not all those times I blurted that word out. This was for real.
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I started planning how I was going to manage life as a single mother of three. Where was I gonna get the money to make it all happen?
When my husband realized that this time I was not saying it out of an emotional outburst, that I was truly moving forward with it. It was like the man I had been asking to be there for me, woke up.
He opened up. We talked about things we never had in 13 years of marriage. He cried. I cried.
I was looking in his eyes and I could FINALLY see he was getting it. He was understanding what needed to be done to work on us.
Since that day, our communication has gotten so much better. We talk about things now more than ever. We share our fears, our dreams. We are going through our marriage as a team, rather than two separate, lost pieces.
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I hate to admit that I never thought we were capable of finding our way back to each other.
People say we can’t make changes until we are ready, until our why is big enough. I am grateful each and every day that my husband found his why, and we are working each and every day to keep our marriage at the forefront of everything.
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