Three things Single Folks need to know about Marriage - guest post from @MaxReddick

Today's post comes from my blog brother @MaxReddick. He took a little hiatus from these innanets but now he's back and better than before. He hasn't posted over at SoulBrother V2 in a while but he's here to drop consider knowledge about his insights into marriage. Show him some comment love...

This upcoming May, my wife and I will have been married nineteen years.  Nineteen years!  We’ve been married so long now that people have begun to say we look like brother and sister.  I’m not sure if that is good or bad, but just to think that when we got married, people were taking bets on just how long it would last.

Now we’ve reached that stage of our lives in which younger people and couples actually seek us out for marital advice.  And the thing is that I really don’t know how our marriage has been successful;  I was just blessed to marry an incredibly intelligent, caring, and most of all, forgiving and understanding women, so I just follow her lead.  But my favorite bougie black blogger asked me to contribute my two cents, so here goes—a few things you single people should understand about marriage.

1.        The Ring Doesn’t Change a Thing

Take a second and think about everything that absolutely irks you about your intended.  Think about everything that absolutely drives you out of you natural born mind?  Well, if you plan on marrying this individual, you had better get used to it because you’ll more than likely be putting up with it for the rest of your lives together.

I hear it all the time:  “Girl, I’m putting up with that foolishness now, but as soon as I walk down that aisle and put that ring on my finger, a few things are going to change.  Hmmph!”  Girl, believe that foolishness if you want to because as soon as you walk down that aisle and put that ring on your finger, ain’t nothing changing;  he’ll be that same person he was before, except now you are stuck with him.

2.        Sex:  For Better or for Worse

I spoke with one of my younger fraternity brothers just a few days ago.  His wife is a pediatrician, and he is a young, up-and-coming attorney.  They have two young children under five, and just made a major investment in a custom built home.

Well, we had a few drinks, and Jose Cuervo took control of his tongue, and he in so many words lamented that marriage had somehow put the skids to a once apparently quite active and exciting sex life.  But marriage wasn’t the culprit;  it was reality.

I can remember the first few years of my marriage.  We had no kids, no bills, no distractions—just us in a one bedroom apartment.  And we got it in.  The older couple who lived below us eventually moved because of the noise.  They knew our names before we ever introduced ourselves.

Then came the kids and the careers and the twelve to sixteen hour days and the mortgage payments and the car notes and whatever other distraction you can think of.  Before long the choice between damn good sex and a damn good nap became quite a hard choice indeed.

But from it all we learned that sex was but one expression of our love for one another.  We could express our love by simply being there for each other, taking care of the emotional needs of each other.  And whenever the kids went to sleep early or were away, or we could steal a little time from work or had a long weekend, I would break out that old mixtape I made back in the day, the one labeled simply “LOVE”, and we make it do what it do.

3.        Happily Ever After Does Not Necessarily Mean You Will Be Happy Every Day

People always remark to me and my wife, “You two always seem so happy together.  How do you do it?”  Well, it’s all a mirage.  While we are happy most of the time, we have our bad days.

If I were to define our marriage with one word, it would be passion.  But passion runs both ways;  love and hate are flip sides of the same coin.  On some days I am so swollen with love that I have to think to myself, “What manner of voodoo has this here woman afflicted me with because I ain’t never loved no woman like that.”  Then on other days, maybe even perhaps in the same day, I’m thinking to myself, “Will someone come get this crazy behind woman.  What demon done got into her?”

But those bad days are few and far between, and most of the time, they hardly ever last even a day at all.  At some point a smile or a caress will make everything all better again, and then I’m searching desperately for the mixtape labeled simply “LOVE” and waiting to get voodooed all over again.

Bougienistas, who else is dying to know what's on that "LOVE" mixtape? What did you learn from today's post? Any questions for Mr. Reddick? Anything to add? The floor is yours.