Search Results for: blog we cannot live on love alone

Navigating Alone Time

How well do you do on your own without your spouse?  I certainly don’t need Jonathan to look after me, and I could support myself without him, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  What I mean is: if there are times that your spouse is away from home from an extended period of time, how do you feel about it? I’ve never liked living alone.  If I wasn’t married, I would prefer having a roommate to living by myself.  I spent the summer before I got married living on my own, and it was unpleasant.  So when Jon goes … Continue reading →

We Cannot Live on Love Alone

During my first year of marriage I wasn’t as happy as I should have been. Despite the supposed “honeymoon period,” I often felt listless and depressed. It took me a while to figure out why. Jonathan has an excellent job with the government. Unfortunately it’s located in a rural area, so most of the jobs are related to the military base that his position serves. Few jobs exist outside of the technology industry. Basically, my plan to start freelance work once we had children, so I could stay at home with them, had to be bumped up a few years … Continue reading →

Resources for Those Who Love Graveyards

Do you enjoy spending time in graveyards and cemeteries? This particular interest is fairly common among genealogists. There are several blogs and news articles that are written about a person’s visit to an interesting graveyard, what the gravestones say, and the history of the people who are buried there. These are great resources for genealogists. Genealogy is the study of family. Often, it is the study of family members that have been dead for several generations. One good way to find out information about people who died long before you were born is to read their gravestones. You can do … Continue reading →

What is Love?

What is love? Love is not a feeling. Oh it may start out that way. But love shows itself in action, by what it does. I have to disagree with the lines in a favorite movie of mine. Matt Drayton the character played by Spencer Tracey says, in ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ ‘The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel, for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt- that’s everything.’ But it’s not all what they feel. The young couple shows their love by their actions because they’re ready to … Continue reading →

Married to a Ghost Hunter: My Interview with Mrs. Hawes – The Answers

If you’ve been following this three part series, you’ve been with me as we progressed from Making Marriages Last: What’s It Going to Take? My Interview with Mrs. Hawes to Married to a Ghost Hunter: My Interview with Mrs. Hawes – The Questions. Now we’ve reached the end, the part where we get some answers. Acknowledgment But before you read Mrs. Hawes’ response, bear this in mind: all relationships encounter outside influences. Some are small, some are large, some don’t make much impact, some can be catastrophic. Mrs. Hawes is an amazing, ultra-supportive wife who should be applauded. In the … Continue reading →

The Power of Friendship

In the recent blogs, Who is your best friend? and Be your own best friend, we looked at the importance of befriending yourself and genuinely liking what you see when you look in the mirror. However, having a good set of supporting friends that we can share good times and bad with is also important to our mental wellbeing. Let’s take a look at what sages and wits through the ages have said about the importance of friends in our lives. Some of these are just great: A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the … Continue reading →

When Is It Emotional Cheating?

Last time I wrote about the importance of our friends, how they’re still so necessary even when we’re married.  I said that we can get some things from our friends that we can’t from our spouses.  That can be anything from goofy times, to a chance to talk about our relationship/our spouse (not bad mouth, but just to talk), to even filling some emotional needs. Now, I realize that this could be a dangerous line.  Emotional cheating is very real, and it’s not something to be taken lightly.  So today I wanted to point out the difference between having some … Continue reading →

Teens Can’t Be Our Entire World

When my children were younger, it felt like they made up my entire world.  And in many ways that is true.  Yet in the midst of raising small children, I still tried to find things that I was interested in, outside of parenting. This can still be a problem when our children become teens.  If our lives revolve solely around them, it’s going to create certain challenges for them and us. The first is that we won’t be prepared for the season when we eventually become empty nesters.  This can be a difficult period for many parents, but it can … Continue reading →

Generational Differences in Marriage Dynamics: Cooking

Due to all of my volunteering, I spend a lot of time each week with people who are more in my parents’ generation than mine. That’s normal enough; once we graduate and enter the work force, our pool of peers naturally expands beyond our age group. I have no problem with this most of the time, but once in a while I feel our generational difference, and that usually relates to our views on marriage. My friends don’t have extremely different views on marriage than me; they’re certainly not the types who think their husbands rule the roost. I don’t … Continue reading →

Not Always Joined at the Hip

Jon and I started dating in college, and we were far from the only ones in our social circles to do so. Some of the others would make fun of us, giving us couples’ names, like the media does for dating celebrities (our name was Jangela). It never really bothered me, except for one potential interpretation: was there some truth in the fact that I didn’t do much without Jon? Looking back, I think that I had enough friends and enough things going on in my college life that were separate from my boyfriend. But I could see how it … Continue reading →