Happy Wife, Happy Life

I was married last year and officially became Mrs. Love.

On our honeymoon we stayed at a fabulous spa resort in the Caribbean with the calm sounds of the ocean waves at our balcony door... and rock-hard beds. I hardly got any sleep those ten days and while some of that was for the right reason, mostly I just couldn't get comfortable for very long.

One night, my mind started going and going and going... if only I knew where that damn OFF switch was. Hubby dead asleep with a smile on his face so I tossed, turned, and tried to ignore the messages I was getting - but they were pretty insistent.

Finally I turned the light on and started writing it all down as fast as I could. For three hours.

I had started to reassemble a lot of the material I'd read about personal growth, leadership, wealth building, teamwork and realize that so much of this material could be directly applied to a different context: to love, specifically how to be super-successful in the context of committed relationships. It came to me in the form of a transformational course content and exercises and guest speakers that I should put together. Okaaaayyy.

That's all well and good. I'm a financial analyst after all and already have one divorce under my belt, so clearly I'm qualified to speak about relationships. (?!) Well, I guess the universe has a sense of humour because not long after I became Mrs. Love I have thought about my pages and pages of notes I felt compelled to write almost every day... for more than ten months now. Procrastination is alive and well in my house too.

My interest in how to make relationships work came out of the ashes of my "starter marriage", a short-lived event in my early twenties. I thought that I was different and of course, it wouldn't happen to me. All I had to do was show up with all of my good intentions and voila: happily ever after. Well, that couldn't have been further from the truth! Out of that, I actually came away with a much healthier respect for committed relationships and the institution of marriage.

That does not mean that I was successful after that either. Nope. Not by a loooong stretch. I had my heart broken into smithereens and did some breaking of my own. Mostly, I ran away from a desire to settle.

I am now very happy in my still-new marriage. When things are going well, I often hear the comment that I'm wearing it well. When things are going really, really well, I am told that I am positively radiantly happy. When we're fighting (yes, we fight), people are too afraid to tell me how surly I look.

This will be a place for me to share what has worked, is working and about some of the many books and courses and how they can apply to make our committed relationships work.

I am deeply concerned about the breakdown of the family and the impact it is having on our society. But more than that, who we choose as our mate in life has such a profound impact on our happiness and general outlook. When things are great at home, we can endure pretty much anything else out there.

So, welcome to my journey. I feel like I've come a long, long way and yet somehow know that I've only just begun.