How I Saved My Marriage: It Wasn't Drugs. It Wasn't Therapy. It Was Taking A Freaking Chill Pill.
I salvaged my marriage by learning to relax.
Curated Lifestyle | Unsplash I started going to yoga to get rid of my muffin top. I was out of shape, and I loved cupcakes. So I put on baggy gray sweatpants, drove to the tiny yoga studio near my home, and took one of those $5 community classes.
The hour and 15 minutes passed slowly. I couldn't touch my toes. But when I slipped into my flip-flops at the end of class, I knew I'd be back.
It wasn't long before I could touch my toes. I could feel myself getting more flexible and stronger. I started pulling off poses that previously would have landed me flat on my face. I was hooked.
The feeling of accomplishing something that had once seemed impossible was exhilarating. I started attending four to six weekly classes while learning how to relax. It was just good to get out of the house.
As a full-time freelancer, I often get lonely working from home. I have three cats, but our conversations tend to be one-sided. I have social media, but I've heard that doesn't count.
My husband, Michael, doesn't arrive home from work until late evening. When he eventually walked through the door, I'd invariably try to share all the things about my workday all at once. But it wasn't fair to rely on him as my sole social outlet.
Besides, things had been weird in our relationship lately. About a year and a half earlier, I'd gone off my SSRIs and my mood-stabilizing birth control because we wanted to start a family. This was risky, as I suffered wild mood swings and sometimes morphed into a "Hulk Smash!" version of myself. But we figured the risk was worth it.
When a year had passed, however, and we still hadn't managed to get me pregnant, things changed between us. We stopped communicating. We stopped being good to each other. Each of us was already disappointed and heartbroken by our struggles with infertility, obviously, but this was compounded by the fact each of us suddenly felt unloved by the other.
He coped by bar-hopping with his colleagues almost every night in a gesture of avoidance. I coped by seething with resentment until — again and again — it all boiled over, and we ended up screaming at each other late at night, my ring flung across the room, my foot out the door.
Several months before I started attending classes at my local yoga studio, our marriage almost ended.
And even though we eventually agreed to fight for our marriage, I still felt I was walking on eggshells.
A communication breakdown can be challenging to repair as explained by divorce coach Karen Finn, "If you're caught up in what you want, what you feel, and what you’re not getting, you'll easily forget the "we" of your marriage. One inspiring behavior of couples who have been happily married for a long time is they remember to walk in one another’s shoes. They try to think from the other person’s perspective and allow the other person to express feelings first."
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The tiny yoga studio was my escape, my sanctuary, away from the stresses of my troubled marriage.
The transformation I began to experience once I started yoga was slow. With every breathing exercise we did at the beginning of class, I could feel myself getting lighter. With every end-of-class savasana, I could feel myself attaining a sort of peace.
Suddenly, I was managing my chronic depression and anxiety just fine. Suddenly, I no longer had to worry I might devolve into a raving lunatic over some small slight or disappointment. Despite my brand new existence as an enlightened being, I wanted more. I wanted to feel this way all the time.
There were still things in my life that left me frustrated, angry, and overwhelmed — our infertility issues, our real estate troubles, the shaky state of our marriage — and I wanted to know how to save our marriage and how to let go of these emotions.
So I fled again, this time to a weekend yoga and cooking retreat in Vermont. On the last day of our retreat, we did an early morning flow and then arranged our yoga mats in a circle.
On the first day, our teacher asked us to share why we were there and what we were hoping to accomplish. This time around, she asked us to share what we had learned.
When it was my turn, I drummed my fingers on my knees and stared at my toes. I picked imaginary pieces of lint off my mat. I snatched a glance around the circle and then swallowed.
"When I came on this retreat," I finally said, "I was angry about so many things in my life."
I paused. They smiled encouragingly, so I went on. I told them about our failure to get pregnant. Our inability to sell our one-bedroom condo without taking a huge financial hit. A handful of things that, when put together, made me feel hopeless, helpless, and frustrated with life.
"But this weekend," I said, "I kept feeling these immense waves of gratitude I had yoga in my life and was on a yoga retreat. I was at a place in my life and in my career where these things were even possible."
My fellow yogis nodded. "I realized I have a lot to be grateful for," I said, feeling I was sliding dangerously close to having a Lifetime Original moment, "so I should probably just chill out."
When I returned home from my retreat, I tried to look at everything through that lens. With every disappointment, I reminded myself of everything I had to be grateful for. With every small frustration, I tried to practice empathy.
Sometimes it made me feel better. Sometimes it didn't. But it was a work in progress. As Donna Farhi wrote in Bringing Yoga to Life, "Life does not become easier; we become easier with life just as it is."
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I found it particularly tough to apply all of this newfound wisdom to my marriage.
After all, it's often those we love the most to whom we act the most insufferably. But Farhi also wrote that "harboring resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die." She went on to write, "We manufacture our torment by failing to detach ourselves from things that ultimately we cannot change in another."
Therein lies the key. No amount of alternate-nostril breathing was going to change my relationship with my husband. No amount of restorative yoga poses was going to change the way I felt when he left his dirty dishes on the coffee table again. I had to change my thinking.
One way to change thinking patterns is described by personal development coach Hilary DeCesare, "Negative thoughts can become your reality if you let them. But you can change your thoughts! Be willing to interrupt the ones that no longer serve you. That’s resilience and empowerment. Commit to the constant conversation with yourself. In this way, you can bring awareness into your everyday experience so when you think of a negative thought, you can intercept it and pivot in a more positive direction."
I had to let go of the need to control his behavior when he spent five hours playing a video game instead of spending quality time with me. I had to practice restraint and withhold judgment when he spent the entire day in his pajamas, watching TV and eating chips for every meal.
Instead of flying off the handle for things that didn't matter, I had to remind myself this was the same person who took me hang-gliding for my 30th birthday, even though he had a fear of heights. Who raved about my writing work to his friends and colleagues. Who eventually attended the very first yoga class I taught, even though he couldn't do a downward dog to save his life and couldn’t care less if he ever did.
Realizing this was a revelation, I've since tried to be mindful of the way I react to Michael when my first instinct is to complain.
I recently asked Michael if he felt my yoga practice was having a positive impact on our marriage.
My husband acknowledged that, yes, my yoga had done more for me than my meds ever had, and, as a result, we fought less and got along better than ever before.
"But you're also around less," he said, "which is good and bad." I narrowed my eyes. "How's it good, punk?"
He laughed. "It's good because I have the house to myself more often. I don't feel bad when I spend five hours playing video games or eating chips for breakfast while watching TV." He paused. "But it's bad 'cause when I want you home, sometimes you aren't there."
I was speechless. I thought back to the time we almost separated when I'd felt such resentment over the fact he rarely came home before I had finally given up on him and gone to sleep. I thought back to all the times I'd missed him so desperately, feeling like the lowest priority in his life. I thought of how I used to place so much pressure on him to be my main social outlet, to be my everything.
Once again, I felt deep gratitude for my yoga. It seemed all I had to do — besides living with gratitude and learning how to reach my legs behind my head and go into a deep backbend — was give Michael the time to miss me.
Steph Auteri is a freelance writer and editor. She's been featured in Playgirl, Time Out New York, American Curves, New York Press, Nerve, and other publications.