I’m going to start this post with a seemingly off topic story about how I got together, twice, with my husband – that I promise actually has a point that is not off topic.
I met my now husband, Andrew, when I was 17 and he was 18. He had a girlfriend, I was the love interest of his best friend. I dated his friend for about 5 months but we weren’t right for each other and by the time we broke up I KNEW I was “in love” with Andrew. Obviously, a guy dating the ex of his best friend is a cardinal friendship sin, especially when you’re a teenager, so I knew nothing could come of it and was very sad and angsty about it but I had every intention of maintaining my stoic silence. Through a ridiculous series of events that started with a silly email chain forward from Andrew’s sister I ended up having to tell him how I felt lest it become public knowledge, only to discover he felt the same. What transpired was a whirlwind couple weeks of chatting online constantly (oh the days of ICQ) and sneaking one on one visits to lament about the fact that we couldn’t be together. It was all very tragic and dramatic. We never acted on our feelings, didn’t so much as kiss during those first weeks, but clearly there was still a relationship being formed…I mean what the heck else is the purpose of endlessly discussing how we can’t be together…while together…sneakily? But we were young and in love and it seemed like an unsolvable problem.
Finally one night we were talking online and I was particularly distraught and he suddenly said “I’m coming to give you a hug”. So at 11 pm he snuck out of his house and drove to mine to hug me, and in an impulse moment on my porch, caught up in the romance of this gesture, I kissed him. Little did I know what a turning point in my life that moment would be.
Of course within a week of that wonderful moment the shit hit the fan and we were (understandably) absolutely put through the ringer by our group of friends, but we stuck through it over the course of the next 6 months and eventually they all got used to us being together. The intensity of our feelings for each other combined with the highly dramatic situation we had to go through to be together made our relationship, well, extremely intense. We were madly in love but fought just as fervently. And at first that passion made it all easy to maintain, even that first bit when our friends were mad at us, and we felt guilty for having hurt Andrew’s greatest friend (who I genuinely love too!) riding our feelings made being together an easy choice. We could handle anything and there was absolutely no question about us being together. I remember dreaming of when we would get married and everything seeming so far away. Getting on with our life couldn’t have happened fast enough.
Well fast forward a couple years to find a very dysfunctional couple. We were co-dependent, suspicious, had no boundaries and a lot of unresolved issues completely separate from each other that we never had time to deal with because we were too busy being hyper-focused on our relationship. We still loved each other intensely but ironically clinging to that, without addressing anything else, was killing our relationship.
So eventually we broke up. We never completely separated from each other’s lives – we had a lot of the same friends, and somehow when things went wrong I often couldn’t bring myself to call anyone but him. I had four other “serious” relationships – two of them with just the worst guys I could have found because I went for the first ones that showed interest in an effort to not run back to Andrew. Then one that was mostly great until he wasn’t really the guy I thought he was. And finally one that was really a wonderful guy but when it came down to committing to him I realized that I had no reason not to EXCEPT that being with him meant I wasn’t going to be with Andrew. I also spent a year before that guy single and dating casually. Every one of those guys wanted me to cut ties with Andrew; they saw the writing on the wall crystal clear, there was a connection there and I was not over that relationship. I tried a couple times but it never stuck.
We were apart for 5 years. We both did a lot of work and reflection during that time; so they were really hard years. I was going through the worst part of some of my physical health problems, before I had any understanding of them and my body; I had my ovary and fallopian tube removed during this time and spent a lot of time navigating a tidal wave of hormones, along with pretty constant heartbreak being in these not great relationships. I was a trainwreck.
Andrew finished University and had to move out of town to work and began to navigate his own baggage. He didn’t ever date anyone seriously and every so often when I was between boyfriends he would make an overture – usually it resulted in us seeing each other a lot more for a while and then me panicking and deciding it wasn’t a good idea and latching myself to the next guy I met.
Clearly, we got back together and moved in together a month after we did. From what I can tell the first year of living with someone is basically one fight after another about where things “belong”, how to fold towels correctly and why the hell there are never any goddamn matching tupperware lids! But we grew together, and started to settle into building our life using all the things we had learned over the last nearly a decade…and now here we are, as of writing this, a month away from 20 years since that first kiss, nearly 11 years of being back together and eight and a half years married.
The thing is, Andrew and I were always in love. We always had it in us that being together is what we wanted and what would make us happiest. The best qualities about us make the other one better. My weakest points coincide with his strong ones and vice versa. Together we’re a stronger unit that makes each of us the best version of ourselves that we can be. But being in love and wanting something isn’t enough without the knowledge, experience and tools to make a relationship work…for us not all of that growth could happen while we were together.
The beginning of anything is exciting. We’re motivated and have rose coloured glasses and intense emotion about doing it. Even when it hurts or is challenging we’re riding a high that can get us past it; it’s easy to “love the pain” or even if we don’t LOVE it we can downplay it a little. But eventually the adrenaline wears off, the thing we wanted loses its shiny new sparkle and isn’t as exciting…we still want the end result but the work required can come to seem like it’s more effort than it’s worth. The light at the end of the tunnel seems further and unattainable via our current means. This is the middle. The part when the work really starts because you’re not being carried by adrenaline and excitement.
Had I thrown in the towel and gotten back together with Andrew when we were just hurting each other and not done the work that needed to be done in order for us to be functional healthy adults, I don’t think we’d be together now. What we were doing that first time around wasn’t working. The intention was good. The execution was not. And we needed to learn how to be good partners to one another. That messy part, the part when we loved each other but had to get better was not a part we could skip. It’s part of our story and a vital part of the strong foundation that we’ve built our life together on.
So, (finally!) my point is that our health goals (or any goals really) are the same. We start out excited and intense with the best intentions, and we’re so motivated, we can ignore even the tough parts; the red flags, the things that absolutely do not work for us. We can completely believe that we’re going to become that person who can’t wait to get our sweat on and we’re going to eat kale every. single. day. (even though we completely hate it). The first day, easy! More kale please! And maybe the second too…I’ve had times when I was motivated for a month…and I’ve had times when the wheels fell off on day two. This is learning! This is the messy middle part and if you ignore the red flags and only focus on the goal you’re actually not helping yourself get there.
Listen, not everyone is going to love sweating and not everyone likes kale (personally I think it’s overrated, and that someone had the AUDACITY to try to substitute it for chips is appalling). Discovering you’re the person who hates those things and bailing on the intense diet you entered into a week ago is the middle part and the best thing you can do is instead of saying you failed and resenting food, and exercise is to analyze what happened. What about your plan didn’t work for you? (Probably the kale.) What might you be willing to do as an alternative? (hello spinach…or, like, any of the other vegetables.)
You don’t HAVE to do a certain kind of workout to get results. You don’t have to work out in the morning if you hate getting out of bed. You don’t have to lift weights if you find it boring. You don’t have to do pilates or yoga for “long lean muscles” (what does that even mean?) And you don’t have to only eat from some list of superfoods to eat healthy. Stop taking a cookie cutter plan you saw someone do on Instagram and assuming it should work for you because it did for them. You’re not them; you’re you. And when we push through towards some distant goal trying to sustain the progress with things we hate doing because we think that’s what we’re supposed to do, relying entirely on our “love” for the goal to fuel our willpower, eventually you’ll resent the goal. And then you just bail on the whole thing. We’re never getting to that goal if at some point we don’t think “hey, maybe it’s not me or the goal that’s the problem here, but the fact that I’m insisting on taking this SAME PATH to get there”.
None of us like that we’re not the person who likes kale. Or that we don’t just have the willpower to do the workout even when we don’t want to. No one wants to be the person who got to be overweight or unhealthy in the first place but facing the realities of how it happened and what we’re ACTUALLY willing and able to do to attain our goals is the only way we’ll find sustainable options. Being realistic is hard. I wanted to get on with the life I thought was imminent when I was a teenager and marry Andrew by the time I was 21, but that would have been a disaster. We know several people who stayed together from high school just fine, but they weren’t us. We didn’t have the tools and we were sustaining our progress to the goal through co-dependence. We ended up blaming each other for the fact that we couldn’t be happy with ourselves. But when we both looked at how we could be together in a more mature, sustainable way and did the work to gain those skills and habits, the life we got down the road is more than I ever could have hoped for.
If you’re trying to make healthy changes two things you can do in the messy middle part, when you’re losing the motivation to give it your every waking moment but don’t want to end up resenting it and throwing in the towel:
- Be honest about what you will and will not do. Stop buying effin kale if you hate it. Seriously. Stop. You can enjoy food!! You can have things you like. Make small, manageable changes – instead of white pasta with alfredo, try a whole grain pasta with olive oil and a bit of parm. Instead of a breakfast pastry, try whole grain toast with nut butter and banana. Make one change at a time. Don’t drop your calorie consumption from 3000 per day to 1200 and then wonder why you’re exhausted and miserable.
- Find an exercise you can enjoy most of the time – you won’t every single time – there are like 1000 different options for exercise now – you can lift weights, do bootcamps, or get a trainer. You can run, walk, swim, bike, rollerblade or skateboard. You can do choreographed dance based routines or even workouts based on drumming. You can do yoga, chair yoga, tai chi or barre. You can rock climb or play tennis or squash. You can do workouts in person, live virtually, or video’s – DVD’s or online. What someone else LOVES for exercise you might not and THAT’S OK. There is no right exercise. Just start to move your body SOMEHOW every day. Start with 10 minutes. Add more when you want to.
The bottom line here is that we don’t find meaning in things without struggle and undervaluing what we gain from struggle weakens every decision we make in that arena going forward. It might not feel good to discover a new routine isn’t right for us, but instead of sweeping it under the rug and ignoring it, facing it, owning what went wrong, and examining how we can do it differently is the most liberating thing we can do because experience is the greatest educator. Stop trying to diminish the value of your experience because it is the foundation that you are building your life on – no magazine article about the best way to lose weight (or stay in a relationship!) is going to do for you what your experience and knowledge of yourself is going to – the more you use your knowledge of yourself (especially the messy parts) – to guide how you build your foundations, the stronger everything that comes after it is going to be.
I’m sure you’ve heard people say “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey” many times in your life, and while cliche, it’s true. Living your life just for the end result is a recipe for frustration…it’s only through living and being present in all the messy stuff that we figure out how to be content in our lives. I had to be happy on my own before I could be happy with Andrew…and I had to own that I hate kale, so I could learn how to forge my own path to being healthy in a sustainable way.
Don’t build your relationships on a foundation of codependency and don’t build your healthy lifestyle around kale (or any other food) with every single meal – use what you’ve learned about yourself to decide what’s right for you for the long run. You may not be able to skip the middle, but you sure as hell can use what you learn from it to move yourself forward…and that’s actually a whole lot better.
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