Learning to love as adults

It is no secret that I have been struggling with my marriage for the last year, but as I have struggled with my marriage I have found that several of my friends are also struggling with there's. One thing we all have in common is that we each met, dated, and married before we were working professionals. Some met in high school, while others met in college, but our common factor is that we were forced to learn our spouses as adults.

We all moved into the "real world" and while trying to learn how to be a working professional, maintain our financial stability without our parents contribution, purchase homes, start careers, change careers, make adult friends, and attempt to learn new places we all somehow forgot that both ourselves and our spouses were no longer in college. While our relationships were neglected and somehow still managed to live in a drunken, party-filled life our individuals grew into adults.

In my own personal life, my husband and I attempted to live as we did in college. We never allowed ourselves to "grow up" as a couple, even though we were making adult decisions such as purchasing homes, building careers, and establishing new friendships. We both made poor choices as adults which lead to mistrust, hurt, and loss.

After almost a year of growing individually, traveling separate journeys, and some how meeting in the middle my husband and I will both tell you that our biggest problem was we never grew out of college. Instead of growing together we allowed each other to grow separately causing a huge divide within our lives and made us more of roommates than husband and wife. As we still try to decide how to make our new individual lives fit together as one, if we decide this is our path, we are forced to learn a new person. The person I met, knew, dated, and married from college is not the person that I thought he was and I am sure that my husband feels the same about me.

As an adult, I am more thoughtful with my decisions and conservative with my actions. In college it was common to see me not only at the bar having just a few too many drinks but also on the table dancing in a skirt just slightly too short, flirting with a boy just a little too young only to end up at my husbands apartment at the end of the night. I am no longer that person. And while my glory days in college were perfect for my time, they are indeed just that - glory days. A memory of my past that is fun to reminisce with my college roommate on a girls weekend, not something I want to relive with my business client. 

I have to admit that there were college things about my husband that I was ok with in college. I thought these habits were cute, funny, or just a phase but as an adult I was not happy with. Instead of talking about these habits and finding a compromise I chose to shut my husband out and to ignore him all together. I was learning as an adult that it was perfectly acceptable to choose not to include people in your life who didn't need to be there, expect this rule didn't apply to my husband considering we were married and no longer easily disposable to each other.

I am working now to learn this new person I married. And while some days I think it would be easier to just divorce and start over, finding someone who fits with me easily as an adult, fulfilling my wants, needs, wishes, dreams I am choosing to give this new husband a try. I hope and pray that as we choose to learn about each other that we can mold our new lives, dreams, desires, and goals into a new adult life - together, with each other.