I dragged my marriage out. I beat the horse, rolled it over, beat it again, moved it, then beat it one more time.

In the process I became a different person. I wasn’t funny chatty anymore. I was incessantly chatty. No one was listening to me at home. I wasn’t ready to leave. I was going to save my marriage. I still thought I could beat a dead horse and get a different result.

How naive of me. It takes two to ride a horse. It takes two to save a marriage.

In this journey of the long road out of a bad situation, my thinking changed drastically.

I first believed all the other marrieds were happy. I still wanted to be one of them. I wanted to be up on that horse and a part of the herd. However, by the time I actually began surrendering to the fact that my marriage was over, I began noticing what I call the ‘half-happy’s.’

The marriages that were vaguely happy. The people that were ‘half-happy.’

Sure, they weren’t beating the horse – they were still riding it. Seems like success, right? To be up on the horse?
Instead of down on the ground beating it?

The truth is their relationship with that horse was showing the wear and tear of time. They weren’t quite overtly unhappy, but they weren’t truly happy either. Nonetheless, they had a death grip on the horse. They weren’t falling off no matter what. They told themselves things like every horse slows down, every horse gets distracted by other horses, and so on.

Okay, most married people won’t relate to this example. They will rationalize that they are really happy.

So let’s give another analogy.

Let’s say you are working in corporate America.

It’s a big office filled with all different types of people. You have the young, eager whippersnappers, the fast climbing thirty-somethings, the fat and happy executives and then mixed among these you have the people who are staying not because they are happy, but because they just need ten more years until retirement or because they make too much money to make a move or because they’re too afraid to risk a new job.

In the beginning of my marital problems it looked like I was the only one who had dismounted. It looked like I was wandering from the herd and all the fat and happy executives.

Today, I realize I was a risk taker. I didn’t want to be one of the ‘half-happy’s.’

Life should be an experiment with joy – not an excuse for why you aren’t completely filled with joy.

I am no longer sad that I could resurrect that dead horse.

It was never the right horse for me.

(Photo courtesy of Pexels)
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