Going from “No, I can’t marry you” to “Omg I can’t wait to marry you” 🤵🏾👰🏾

I can’t even believe how my relationship has turned around in the past five months. We’ve been together going on 6 years. Very early on we talked about getting married. It’s like the love was there but we’d have some terrible arguments sometimes. Last fall we set a date of 2/20/20 to get married; this was supposed to be our hard date. Come hell or high water we were gonna do it. Well over that time shit just kept going left. I felt like he’d just pop off and be disrespectful to me because he got mad or irritated over something and it got to the point where he was being disrespectful and even embarrassing me in public. For example we were in an argument in the car and he was driving all crazy so I was like let me tf out because I’m not risking my life over shat. I get out and he’s literally driving the car next to me yelling expletives out the out at me calling me “Dumb as fuck” etc etc. Then another time close around the same time was this incident, I had gotten sucked into a job scam. Instead of supporting me through it, he was saying things like I was gullible and making me feel stupid. I wasn’t stupid. I was just desperate for a job so I could improve OUR lives. Around this same time many other negative things happened but I really don’t want to lay it all out here. But I ultimately ended up telling him that I couldn’t marry him. I felt like our communication sucked; I felt like he didn’t trust me and if he couldn’t trust me, I couldn’t trust him. We never had anything like cheating or physical abuse going on in the relationship, but all the other stuff that kept happening made me not feel comfortable attaching my life to his. I’ve been married before and I never want to be stuck in a bad marriage again. So I told him with the current state of our relationship I couldn’t marry him and that we needed to take a step back. I guess technically we took a “break”. Honestly that was only a couple days because we still texted and talked but I think it may have opened his eyes to “we need to do something to fix this”. For my part, it made me see that despite what had been happening, I still wanted to be with him; I just refused to marry him with the way things were. He really wanted to be married and was hurt that I was now saying ‘no’.

Anyway we decided to go to work on our relationship communication. We worked on becoming more vulnerable to each other. I think both of us are defensive people and that was coming out. For example instead of us being vulnerable and saying “baby I love you and it hurt my feelings when you said blah blah blah”, we would get mad and strike back. Over the past few months communication has really improved and I think a lot of it has to do with using just coming to the conclusion that we want to be vulnerable with each other and we have to trust that we love each other no matter what and that we have each other’s best interests at heart and we’re going to take care of each other’s needs no matter what those needs are.

This past week we did the quizzes for the Five Love Languages and I swear that’s pushed us up another level with our communication. You’d think that since we’ve been together for years, I’d know that his love language is physical touch and spending time together but I honestly had no idea but now that I know, I make sure I’m loving on him and cuddling him and making time to just focus on him. I’ve noticed that he makes an effort to tell me he loves me; tell me that I look good; etc. (I’m positive affirmations).

Things have made a 180 degree change and I couldn’t be happier. Last week he tells me that he wants me to start wearing my engagement ring again and would pay me if put it back on. After thinking about it, last night I told him that if he asked me to marrying him, I’d definitely say YES. So we are going to start with a fresh proposal at some point (he wants to propose “right” this time, but that’s another story).

I just wanted to share this with you ladies. I know someone is probably going through hard times with their man. There’s hope. If you need to take a step back, do it. If you can get into therapy, do it. If you can’t afford therapy, get on the Internet and look up articles on ways to improve communication in your relationship, sit down together (and on your own) and do those relationship exercises. You just have to talk and be open and willing to work on the relationship.....BOTH people. Five months ago I thought “no way am I going to marry this man” and now I’m thinking “omgosh I can’t wait to marry this man”.