In a marriage, there may be many obstacles that stand in the way that a couple has to deal with. You can either choose to walk away or overcome life's obstacles. These people beat the odds and have made progress in their relationships, for the better.
Back When Her Husband Was Unemployed…
“My husband was laid off from his job while I was still on maternity leave. Our son was only a month old.
It took him 6 months to find work again. We had to move in with my dad.
I started to hate my husband during that time. He wasn’t good at being a parent to a baby. He was clueless about everything, and once I went back to work I would usually take the baby to daycare because I felt like they could care for him better than my husband. He never offered to take the baby to daycare, and sometimes would get mad if I wanted to sleep a little longer and have him take the baby instead.
The longer he went without a job the lazier and more selfish he got. It would take so much to just get him off the couch. He got hateful. He stopped caring for himself. He was suffering from depression and it was so so hard to get through.
He finally went to a temp agency and they placed him with a job that paid extremely well, and they wound up buying out his contract to keep him as a full-time employee. Once he got back on a schedule everything got better.
Our son is 2 now and he’s an amazing dad.”
Fixing Their Finances So He Can Retire
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“We are surviving it now.
There is an age gap and a salary gap, between my wife and I. The plan is for me to retire in 5-7 years. In the meantime, she is finishing her education in order to promote and increase her salary to fill the gap so I can retire.
She is horrible with money, has debt that preceded our marriage, but is really trying. 4 days ago she broke down and told me how much she has been struggling and how deeply worried she is that she won’t be able to get it together in order for me to retire.
So effective immediately, we agreed that she will hand over all her money to me and I will manage all the bills, put a plan in place to pay off her debt, and put her on an allowance.
I’m deeply grateful that she came clean and that she is so committed to me being able to retire. We have time to work this out and we will. We will be able to dodge this bullet, thanks to her coming clean with me. Nonetheless, it’s a quantum shift in our relationship and the biggest threat to the health of our relationship, so far. But we will get through this together and as partners with the same goal.
And that, my friends, is how a marriage is supposed to work!”
Her Husband And Child Were Both Hospitalized?
“We’ve been married for 37 years tomorrow. I’d say the first year was the hardest – adjusting to living with someone else and all their bad habits.
However, there was a period of time that was extremely stressful. We had a 4-year-old and 9-month-old twins.
Our younger son had nearly died due to heart failure because of asthma that the doctors couldn’t get under control – he had been in the hospital for about a week. My husband had been experiencing severe pains in his back which the doctors were brushing off (he’d visit the emergency room while leaving the hospital) I finally phoned our general practitioner to insist that he arrange a cardiac stress test as it just didn’t appear to be muscle pains to me. I’m amazed that he listened to my 25-year-old self and got him in right away.
As I was arguing with the pediatric doctor to let my kid out of the hospital, I was paged by our doctor that my husband was on his way in.
Well, it turned out he was 90% blocked in 2 arteries at age 31. We found out who our friends really were. My family, except my sister, were bad too. It was an incredibly lonely time.
We were enthusiastic Christians at the time and the response from the people at church was fairly good for my husband, except for a couple people who insisted he had secret sins he needed to confess (to them…hahaha) but not at all supportive of me for some reason. It was just a horrible time.
Our general practitioner – who loved us – was amazed that I didn’t walk away from all of it. Seriously. But how could I? I loved my family. I wanted them better – how would leaving improve anything? Sure, it was tempting to run away but I knew it wouldn’t solve anything.
Financial difficulties aren’t fun either but a cakewalk compared with that.”
Not The Best Mother In Law…
“My mother in law was incredibly disrespectful of me (from another culture as well). Basically treated me like the help or something. While my husband was always very good to her, he did not allow her to demean me in his presence. So she only really treated me terribly, when we were alone.
When I was younger, I never kicked up – respect your elders blah blah blah – but by the time I was 40, I’d had enough. She had no right to treat me like trash when I was doing more for her than her own daughter. I blew up at her and demanded she treats me appropriately because I deserved that. Her response was that she treated her other daughter-in-law (back home) the same way for which I blew even more because that lady is a saint – the kindest and most thoughtful person I have ever met who, unlike me, would not have uttered a peep in regards to her mother in law’s evil behavior. I never saw my mother-in-law again after that visit. Her health kept her from visiting and I sent my husband there alone – it was too difficult for all of us to go and I had no great desire since the rest of his family weren’t much better (the in-laws were great though).
However, from my understanding, she acted much better toward my alternate over there. I know she spoke badly about me though to the family there because they called my husband to complain about it. He backed me up. He’s a good man.”
The Life Of An Army Wife
“The Army.
My, now, husband and I met and started dating the summer before he went to boot. He learned that he was getting stationed across the ocean where it’d cost $1,000 for me to come visit, if I even was allowed to, so we decided to take the leap and get married after he got done with Advanced Individual Training.
I love the man more than anything, he truly is my best friend. But the Army life has taken us so far away from everyone we know and everything that’s familiar.
The job market sucks where we currently live so I am pretty much either a burger flipper (not that there’s anything wrong with it, I just had a better job back home), work for the army, or a house wife. Those are my options. It’s hard.
We have money to survive but there’s nothing here that makes me feel like I have a life aside from him, and he’s getting dragged out to the field every other week and he’s about to be gone for a 3-month deployment. I’ll be stuck, alone across the ocean from everyone and everything that makes my life worthwhile.
I definitely don’t have it as bad as some people on this thread and I definitely am happy with my husband.
The Army is just screwing our lives up at the moment.”
His Wife’s Cancer Diagnosis…
“Just a few months into my marriage, my wife was diagnosed with cancer.
My wife is just a few months out of chemo. Her hair is only an inch long and our relationship has actually gotten stronger for it. The day of the surgery was an absolute nightmare though.
They thought it was only a cyst on her ovaries and was going to do a minimal invasion surgery, got in there and saw cancer, took a sample, and notified us that they needed to get a specialist.
When the specialist got there, he decided to go total hysterectomy (which is what we wanted in this case).
The longest (about) 36-48 hours of my life. We didn’t even hit a year yet (at the time). It all happened so fast.
No chance of saving any eggs, no chance of future children. Admittedly I always wanted to be a father since I was old enough to have a girlfriend. She had just recently been opening up to the idea of one day having a kid and it all got ripped away.
It has been pretty psychologically hard on her (as well as physically obviously) so it has even impacted our sex life.
But through all of this, we have learned to communicate a lot better, and also about helping accommodate each other’s emotional and physical needs.
Still rough but we have definitely grown together from this. It only gets better!
My biggest tip:
As a couple – You will never return to the version of normalcy from before. Just search for the NEW normalcy.
As the husband – She will be emotionally devastated. Even if she doesn’t seem like it. Don’t try to be ‘Mr. Fix It.’ The fact is you can’t. Don’t try to make her talk about it. Just let her know you still love her. If she wants to talk, JUST LISTEN. If she doesn’t want to talk, JUST SIT THERE AND DO NOTHING. Just being there, literally just sitting and breathing, can help them not feel alone.”
Fighting Right Before Their Wedding Day?
“We had a big fight ten days before the wedding (still counts?). It was one of those fights where I had to question whether or not I should even stay. It was about past infidelity (years prior). I stayed, although for a while I wondered if I had only decided to stay because I didn’t want to go through the process of canceling a wedding.
We eventually got through it though. It took a lot of work and to a certain extent, the trust is still being rebuilt.
I don’t regret staying though. I love him and the cheating had happened so long ago when our relationship first started and we were both totally different people then. But I do love him and he understands that there may still be times when I get nervous over it, that if it were to happen again I would be finished, and he is good about letting me express my feelings but at the same time I couldn’t continue to hold it against him.
We’ve grown closer since then and I do appreciate what came out of the situation.”
Dealing With Death Made Their Relationship Stronger
“I don’t think mine has been as bad as others have had it. However, for nearly a whole year after just getting married, I spent raising our child alone while he was overseas. Then not even a year later after moving overseas with our child, I found out a beloved aunt had passed away in a car accident, died on impact. I was freaking devastated, even though my husband was by my side the whole time.
A few months after that I was told my uncle was trying to commit suicide while my husband was at work. He rushed home to be with me and take care of our child as I spent the whole day crying and trying to figure out what was happening.
Then last August my sister came close to dying; She is 5 years older than me and even though we fought as children and adults she is still my sister. Come find out she had a fibroid that was massive and causing massive blood loss 3 separate times in a short span between August and October. She had to have them removed. During all of these things, my husband was there for me, taking time off of work to be home and take care of the house and our son as I grieved.
Not that long ago my husband’s pet cat passed away, I had never seen that man cry but the day it happened he was skyping with his mother when she just nonchalantly blurted it out. She did later apologize to her son for telling him that way but that was HIS cat and he loved that cat.
It’s not a lot and probably not a big deal but a lot of those times when things had happened on my end I wished I could just go back home. I lived over 15,000 miles away from any of my family and so does my husband, though my husband isn’t as close to his family as I am. Though when I brought up my feelings about wanting to leave and just be done every time that man would tell me if it was what I wanted then do it. We have only been married for 3 years going on 4 and we have already been through a lot, but things like this have made our marriage stronger. I am ever so grateful for my husband.”
Living In A Hospital Room?
“My husband and I were together 8 years before we got married, and already had a child. We had already faced a lot in those 8 years, including a drunken one night stand, the loss a parent, the aftermath of his childhood abuse, endless fighting. Basically, our home was a war zone.
But things got a lot better and we decided to finally make it legal. We thought we’d already faced the worst. We were so far from correct.
Less than 3 months after we wed, our kid was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
We went from newlyweds who had just bought a house, to basically living in a pediatric oncology hospital room, to bringing home a sick child who had 3 surgeries and chemotherapy every week for more than a year. We spent the 1st year and a half in our home with our child’s bed beside ours, to assist her in middle of the night vomiting, night terrors, and general fear.
We more or less became roommates or two ships who pass in the night. Unless we were talking about anything related to our kid, we were either not talking or just fighting. I hated everything about him. He was, in my eyes, the worst person ever. He turned to drinking to deal with everything, which his alcoholism is something we’d already dealt with in the past. I was constantly a brat, which only fueled his behavior. We were fire and gasoline, to the point where we’d spend countless hours in hospital rooms but only exchange maybe 5 words. Eventually, I took our daughter and left. While our kid fought for her life, we fought each other.
But much like our daughter, we slowly began to heal and repair. As she built strength, so did our relationship. We started talking more, going on dates again, and honestly…we had a lot more sex to increase physical affection and closeness, something he struggles with due to being abused as a child.
Our daughter has been in remission for 13 months. The last 2 has been where I feel our marriage has made the most growth. We both deal with anxiety and varying levels of depression, but we both know the other is dealing with things the best we can, and we try to cut each other some slack every now and then.
We are still far from perfect. But even a 25% increase from where we were a year ago is something we’re holding onto. We know we can be good together, but sometimes we forget.
Although I’m hopeful we continue to improve, I’m only human and can only deal with so much. The same goes for him.”
Drama Caused By The Ex-Wife…
“Our situation is more of one that is always running just below the surface of our marriage: Dealing with his ex-wife.
She’s really inconsistent and changes her interests and goals on a whim. She’s always making promises to the kids that she can’t keep and, on more than one occasion, are promises that my husband and I have had to step up and fulfill. She makes all these plans to move here, then there, then go study in yet another location, and sometimes these things happen and sometimes they don’t. You can’t bring anything critical to her attention because she just shuts down and blames my husband or the kids for the problems in her life. She tries to influence my opinions to get me to side with her on wild ideas, which I disdainfully rebuff.
She also plays favorites with the kids and, as a result, my sons have strained relationships with her, while my daughter is spoiled with attention from her. My daughter is given more and finer material possessions by her than those for the boys, and speaks and behaves in a regressive fashion for her age because her mother treats her like she’s four instead of nearly ten.
My husband and I argue about when the timing is right to take a stand against her, ignore her, or let her have her way. I have called my in-laws on more than one occasion crying because of how powerless I am against her and her stupid will. Dealing with her makes me feel callous and dead inside like I could say the meanest things ever and not think twice. But I can’t because I love the kids so much and that is their mother.
I think she’s good, in a way, because my husband and I have to be on the same page for everything when it comes to going toe to toe against the ex-wife. We have to present a united and consistent front to give the kids a place to call home and to be people they can rely on because I don’t know if they’ll be able to rely on her in the future. But it’s a strain. And it can be scary.
I knew what I was getting in to when I married him, but some days are much harder than others. But if she is as bad as it gets, then we’ll be ok. My heart goes out to the couples out there who face struggles bigger than one wild, dumb ex-wife.”
Overcoming His Cheating Past?
“My parents’ marriage of almost 25 years (in September) has survived through my father’s extramarital affair. Cheating in itself is not that impossible to get over, in my opinion, but the circumstances of it are what makes it worse.
Basically, the affair happened while my mother was depressed following the sudden death of my maternal grandmother about one year prior. But my mum told me that even so, she would have been able to get over it sooner if it weren’t for the fact that my dad didn’t just sleep with this woman, but he took her out on dates, bought her presents, treated her like a princess, while my mother was a maid/cook/emotional punch bag for him. I mean, before the affair, my parents had disagreements, and the romance wasn’t as obvious anymore, since they HAD been married for 20 years, but they were still happy.
After the affair happened, my father started treating my mum as if she was an idiot, as if every thing she did was wrong, and didn’t appreciate anything she did for him. Mind you, she was dealing with a depression alone, cause I had moved out to go to University, about 2000 km away, the year prior. My dear old dad wasn’t even working that hard to hide the affair, leaving receipts around the house, and not coming up with even slightly believable excuses for not coming home some nights. My mum suffered in silence while this was going on, and she kept it quiet despite the fact that we were video-chatting almost every evening.
It all culminated with my father getting beyond drunk one night and daring to hit my mom. He luckily stopped after one hit and left the house, so my mom was relatively ok since he’s a lot bigger than her and used to be an amateur boxer and a police officer, with “just” a bruise to show for it. He only returned the next day, and she confronted him about the affair. She was also ready to leave and to get a divorce. He convinced her to stay and try to discuss it more thoroughly, and maybe try to save their marriage. He promised her that he would break up with the mistress and that he would never do that again. To be fair, he did break up with her. The only reason I know about any of this, at least for sure, is because my mum wouldn’t video chat me for a few days after the incident, and even when she did, I noticed that something was off about her, and through the magic that is an HD webcam, I saw a bruise. She then broke down and told me as little as she could, because she didn’t want to ruin my relationship with my father. Needless to say, that ship had long since sailed at that point. I told her that he was always going to be my father, but a part of me now hated him for daring to raise a hand against her, and for daring to not just cheat on her, but actually have a full-on relationship with that woman, while treating my mom like trash. Oh, and the kicker, as I found out a couple of years later, my parents had been to the mistress’ wedding a few years prior, before she apparently decided to divorce her husband and ruin somebody else’s marriage, a woman who she had looked into the eyes.
This altercation occurred around mid June 2013, and I had a plane ticket to come home in August. As August was nearing, my mum told me that I should expect to come back home to just my father. She was planning to move out and divorce him. I supported her decision, and even encouraged it. When I did get home, my mum was still there. They had managed to patch things marginally up. They still weren’t really talking to each other, or rather my mother wasn’t talking to my dad, beyond the bare minimum, which mostly meant that she would only talk to him while I was around, or if it was something she simply couldn’t avoid. My father had also apparently planned a family trip to Venice as an apology to my mother. He didn’t (and still doesn’t) know that I knew about the affair and the drunken incident.
My parents are still together, four years later, so their marriage did survive. My dad doesn’t know that I know, and he’s treating my mum better than back then, but it’s still not ideal. I think my mum forgave him more than I ever will. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still not over it, but she seems to want to preserve their marriage, so she’s well on the way to doing that. She told me that he begged her to stay because he loved her, and I think he does in his own way. But I can honestly say that their relationship is not the same as it was before. Even at their lowest point, when they were struggling financially, or when one of their parents was sick, my parents’ relationship was something great, it was something to look up to. But once he betrayed her trust, something broke irrevocably, and nothing either of them does will ever fix it. It also changed my relationship towards my father for the worse. I still love him, but there’s always a part of me that wonders what he’s done now if he’s ever being extra nice to my mum. And that same part of me is always a little bit angry at him, just constantly, constantly!
So if you are out there now and are thinking of cheating, and you also happen to find this comment, don’t. Just DON’T! I can guarantee that it won’t stay hidden, and something in your relationship will break in some invisible but irreparable way. Because I can assure you, that even before my mother broke down and told me what was wrong, I knew that something was wrong. I happened to be visiting my parents’ around March 2013, when the affair was full swing, and I saw and felt the difference. I might of not immediately jumped to the conclusion that my father was cheating, because that still seemed ludicrous given how much they cared for each other, but I saw that my parents were no longer happy.”
And I can see that there are people in this thread that have survived through so much, who have had to fight far worse things to keep their marriage and even lives, but nothing breaks a relationship quite as much as such a deep betrayal of trust.
Emotional Trauma Of Having A Miscarriage
“About 2 weeks after we were married, my wife became pregnant. We were both extremely scared, but we began to look forward to starting a family. We told our families the good news, only for her to miscarry a week later. My wife was crushed and fell into a deep depression.
Within the next few months, my wife left her job, we sold our house and moved back to our hometown. She started a new job at a place she really enjoyed, and almost a year after the miscarriage, she was pregnant again.
There were no complications during pregnancy until my wife’s water broke at 34 weeks. We were scared of losing another baby and didn’t know what would happen. Although he spent 3 weeks in the NICU, we now have a happen little 3-month-old son, and our relationship is as strong as ever.”