Yesterday I accomplished almost nothing on my overwhelming to-do list, but instead of staying up all night in an attempt to remedy a days worth of procrastination like I usually do, I went to bed early and woke up this morning feeling renewed and ready to tackle the day. I refreshed my inbox to find an email from a reader that had a question, or maybe plea, that I have heard before. The underlying tone said to me, “Please find a way to convince me your husband is not a jerk.”

Why would she think this? Because she is a wonderfully astute dedicated reader who has likely picked up on some very bold statements I have made in the past. One concerned my weight, the other my spending, and both sounded something like “My husband told me he wanted me to change this thing about myself and that I had no chance at a relationship with him unless I did so.”

When we were still dating we used to spend hours in the car together, driving back and forth to SLC for a class twice a week, and on one of those drives we talked about my weight. He admitted that he would not have wanted to date me if I still weighed 198 lbs (my highest weight, which I was sitting at the very first time we remember meeting in 2006). You sent some flack his way when I admitted that one and I just let it slide under the rug.

Then, last week I alluded to his so-called domineering tendencies once again when I talked about budgeting and wrote that reigning in my spending habits was a pre-requisite to marriage. Debt = no deal in his ledger.

This isn’t the first time his guidelines have been questioned. We actually spent most of our dating relationship long distance while he was working in Dallas and I was still going to school, and he would often call me at the end of his long day while I was watching my favorite guilty pleasures with my favorite girls. He expressed concern for the kind of shows I was watching and let me know that he expected to have certain standards set forth in his future household. I sold all 10 seasons of Friends and my two seasons of Grey’s Anatomy on DVD because he stated his principles, and I decided to align with them. In moments of weakness I’ve tuned in to one or two episodes of what used to be my all-time favorite show (“The One With The Late Thanksgiving” anyone?) but for the most part I have held strong. For various reasons related to our personal standards we have stopped viewing many of our favorite shows including (but most certainly not limited to) Friends, Grey’s Anatomy, House, Bones, and many others which I fall in love with and then proceed to painstakingly eliminate. Although it really isn’t that hard to limit consumption of popular shows in this house since we don’t have a signal on our tv. ;)

You hear of examples like this and you want to know why an intelligent able-bodied woman like myself would let such a tyrant rule over her. Am I right?

My dad and I had this same conversation once, when discussing my relationship in context with another we are both familiar with. In reference to finances, I asked my dad if he saw my husband as domineering, as we believed the other man to be in his relationship with his SO. My dad took a moment to carefully consider, as he always does (getting answers to the question “Can I go over to so-and-so’s house?” in high school was always painfully slow), and then said no. “That Husband isn’t oppressive, he’s principled. He has a certain standard for his life and he isn’t going to let that slide for anyone.”

My dad nailed it with his observation, and I thanked him for teaching me well when I was younger. He spent a lot of time drilling into our minds the phrase “Don’t marry a man expecting to change him.” I came into this relationship knowing I had to discover as much about TH as I possibly could, and then consciously evaluated whether I felt prepared to live with his ideals. When he popped the question I said yes because I believed that every change he had asked me to make so far had been for my own good, and/or the good of our relationship.

Why did TH tell me no marriage unless you are debt free? Because he doesn’t want to work until he is 75 years old. And he had to see a change in my habits before we said “I do”, otherwise he knew the likelihood that he would be hobbling to work with a cane in hand was high.

The media consumption standard? Because he doesn’t like what it does for his thoughts (and I agree, my thoughts are much “cleaner” when I exercise caution about what I view), doesn’t like how often we let our standards relax over time if we let ourselves justify viewing certain things, and he doesn’t like when parents set a double standard by telling their kids “I can watch this, but you can’t.” I can’t say I disagree with any of those.

The “I don’t want you to be overweight” thing? Because as he has told me many times, he wants to die first. He wants me to be in the best physical shape possible so I will live longer so he doesn’t have to live without me for a single moment. If that doesn’t say “I love you”, then I don’t know what does.

As the reader who emailed me suggested, the easiest way to convince you that our relationship is indeed a balance of mutual sacrifice would be to tell you more frank and intimate details about the man I am married to. To reveal the standards I have set for him in our marriage, and the standards I told him he had to live up to before we could marry. I assure you those standards exist, and they are things we will continue to work on together throughout our lives, but this is a blog about me and my life not he and his. I put myself out there because I am an extroverted attention loving fool. He is an introverted hermit who would prefer not to have the majority of his life splashed across the ‘net without abandon. But he can see what blogging does for me, the way it allows me to form lasting friendships with a diverse range of people, and that now that I have had a taste of this public life I would never be happy going back, and so he gives me the go ahead to keep writing quite openly. Yes I have the freedom to write whatever I desire, he really can’t stop me from doing so, but I adhere to his guidelines because my marriage is absolutely the most important thing to me. And a happy marriage is made up of those little compromises that allow you to show your spouse how much you care.

It is likely that some of you will continue to pity me because you believe I am in a patriarchal oppressive relationship and that my belief system may or may not be preventing me from realizing that. I could spill all of my husbands secrets, air out his dirty laundry and expose his faults, and explicitly detail the changes he had to make to marry me, not just I him, thereby gaining your lasting approval and a place card at the 21st century free thinking independent women’s table. But I would likely sacrifice the health of my marriage in the process, and your praise is not worth poverty of marriage. So I will continue to be honest in a very one sided manner. I will write candidly about both my triumphs and failures, for I believe that this is the kind of franknesses you have come to expect from me, but you will only hear glowing praises concerning my husband. No detailed transcripts of our screaming matches (which we actually don’t have, but wouldn’t it be juicy if we did?) or of my (daily) frustrations with him. When you come here and read what I write, you will only hear me speak of him with support in my voice and praise shining in my eyes. If you still doubt the status of my relationship know this: there isn’t a night that goes by where you won’t find me on my knees, head bowed in prayer, thanking God for blessing me with this husband of mine.

There isn’t anyone out there who could make me happier.

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