Category: Married Life

When anxiety breaks

Posted on by jplatt27

Before I went on vacation, I wrote about the separation anxiety I experience before leaving Mike. My anxiety “broke” the night before I left for St. Lucia: I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and spent so much energy doing so that I went to bed at 9:30. I spent the morning after reflecting on and journaling about my experience. I want to share a little bit about my anxiety with the hope that someone else experiencing what I do may feel that they’re not alone or so that someone that hasn’t ever experienced anxiety can understand a little better what it feels like.  The following is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote before I left.

_____________________

I’ve exhausted myself. My anxiety over leaving Mike came to a head on our date last night. I made it through the meal OK but any time Mike brought up the trip, I tensed up and would give one word answers. I didn’t want to talk about it. Because it reminds me of the anxiety. Everything came to a head in the car. And once the anxiety broke and the waves of tears came crashing through, I felt worlds better.  The tension that had been in my chest for at least 48 hours was released. Physically and mentally I felt completely different. But so did Mike.

In releasing my stress, I snapped at Mike a bit, saying things that got him angry and caused him to be defensive. As the tension in me subsided, the tension in him started to build. And he got frustrated and quiet. But when he took my hand walking up the driveway, I felt relieved, comforted. How I’d wanted to feel all night. 

I hate that I do this, that I have such severe anxiety that causes me to act this way.  I wish I could articulate to Mike how severe, how strong, and how deep the anxiety is. While I’m conscious of the anxiety, the feelings, the fear, the pain, the tension is completely subconscious.  No matter how much rational self-talk I give to myself, it doesn’t help. Because this isn’t something that I can choose.  These feelings run deep and they are strong and choosing to try and ignore them, to push them down doesn’t help. In fact, it only makes the outburst that much worse.

________________________

As Mike gets excited for his trip to Disney this weekend and my anxiety starts to settle in this morning, I hope that we don’t have a repeat of last week.  To prevent that, I’m being honest with myself about my feelings and communicating them to Mike.  I’m also trying to focus on how great it will be when he gets home. How excited we’ll be to see each other.

Oh, and we’re not going to spend $100 on a dinner date this time.

Separation anxiety

Posted on by jplatt27

I get separation anxiety when I’m going to be away from Mike for a little while.  I think this started at some point during college and I can’t explain exactly why it started or why it continues today.  But it’s something I deal with.  And it can be intense.

So even though I’m super excited about going to St. Lucia with my sisters (Melissa, Chrissy, and Becca) for a week starting tomorrow, I’ve been battling this anxiety for the whole week.

As a sub-conscious way to protect myself, I’ll start to get short with Mike, frustrated with him for silly things, and will start to distance myself from him. Of course, this is the exact opposite of how I want to spend days together before days apart.

Once I leave or he leaves, I’m fine. I’ll shed a tear or two and get on with the fun. But the couple days leading up to the departure are rough.

So that’s where I am today.  Anxious about packing up and leaving tomorrow. Nervous that I’ll ruin our date tonight by picking fights or being snappy at my husband when all I want is a fun, romantic, relaxing evening together. And excited for vacation with my sisters all at the same time.

I’d love to know:

Do you ever have separation anxiety?  How do you get through it?

Breakfast at the table

Posted on by jplatt27

Yesterday morning, Mike took his breakfast (my favorite pancakes) and coffee to the kitchen table.  “Sitting at the the table this morning?” I said, hopefully. We always eat breakfast at home during the week but usually while watching The Today Show, Morning Joe, or Mike & Mike. We hadn’t really seen or spoken to each other for two days while Mike was working an event for his job and when he got home at 11pm and greeted sleeping me with a kiss my 1/4 awake response was “What, you’re not even going to tell me you’re home?” Welcome home, huh? The next morning, I was excited to chat, had so many things to share and Mike sitting down at the table told me that he was open to some conversation.

I love when we eat at the table together but it’s a rare occurrence.  We usually eat dinner eat on the couch at the coffee table while watching TV. But recently we’ve both realized that we should eat at our table more.

It’s amazing how much more we talk when we’re sitting across the table from each other–we’ll actually have a conversation. Not like we don’t chat when we’re on the couch but the conversation is much more engaging, much more of a dialogue when we’re sitting at a real table. On the couch, it seems like we’re just reporting out.

If you ever feel disconnected from your significant other, I suggest sitting down to dinner.

I think it’s really important for couples to sit across the table from each other and talk and listen.  Honestly, this is important for any people that are living together, family members, friends, roommates, whatever.  It’s easy to go about your business and not really talk. And doesn’t it feel so good to really talk?

I’d love to know:

How often do you eat at the table? Do you agree that sitting at the table facilitates better conversation?

Participate in Life Fund

Posted on by jplatt27

We had a great time at Zach and Emily’s wedding last weekend.  Blessed to be friends with each of them individually, the happiness I usually experience at a friend’s wedding was doubled for me. Zach and Emily were both so happy and so in love.  It was amazing.   Emily is a beautiful person but I haven’t seen her as radiant and happy as she was on her wedding day.  We had a great time celebrating with them and look forward to sharing more happiness with them in the future.

Part of the reason the weekend was so great was because we didn’t have to worry about money or how we were going to pay for things this weekend. No, a wedding fairy didn’t come down and make the weekend free.  We planned ahead for occasions like this in our 2012 budget. While we want to attack our debt and try to save a little bit of money, we don’t want to forgo life events and sharing in special, happy times with friends to do so.   We now allocate money each month for upcoming weddings and other celebrations.  We call this line in our budget our “participation in life” fund. Because we planned ahead, we didn’t have to worry about where money for gas, meals, tolls, the hotel, and gift would come from or put these things on a credit card.

Cheers to celebrating stress-free!

 

Missing each other

Posted on by jplatt27

Yesterday morning I found myself texting my husband “I miss you.” No, he’s not out of town.  He’s here.  And I’m here.  But he agreed, “I miss you too,” he said.

We’ve actually spent a decent amount of time together this week. We were in the car quite a bit last weekend. We had dinner together the past two nights and watched quite a bit of TV together over the course of the week.  So how can we miss each other?

I’ve noted before that time together isn’t always quality time (along with other notes for living together). And the time Mike and I spent together was not quality time. Mike’s been preoccupied with work and I’ve just been down overall this week (hence the lack of posts) so we’ve been zoning out in front of the TV and not spending time chatting or connecting after work.

We go through periods like this where one or both of us is busy or preoccupied and our relationship is on the back-burner temporarily.  We’ll feel seriously disconnected and like we need to catch up with one another. Neither of us are unhappy or alarmed at this.  We simply recognize it for what it is and hope to reconnect with a date this weekend.

I’d love to know:

Do you ever feel disconnected from your significant other?  How do you deal with it?

Our "first" Valentine's Day

Posted on by jplatt27

Our first Valentine’s Day as a married couple was probably our best yet.  Ok, definitely our best yet.  Considering I asked Mike to brainstorm some past Valentine’s Days for a post on 2/14 and neither of us could remember what we did last year.

This Valentine’s Day, Mike had a sweet idea: to try to replicate the dessert pizza from one of our favorite DC restaurants and have dinner at home.  I’d been wanting to recreate Matchbox‘s dessert pizza since we started making our own pizza months ago so I loved this thoughtful idea.

Mike let me choose what we had for dinner so we made this amazing lasagna. We made this lasagna over a year ago and hadn’t been able to find the recipe since. But with a little searching, Mike was able to find it. (Click here for the recipe.)

I had the sauce for the lasagna working when Mike got home from work. And he quickly got to work on the dough for the pizza. We had the Pandora love songs station going and were totally in our element.

After the lasagna was in, the dough was rising, and we had some dishes done, we sat down at the island for a little appetizer.  (I can get grumpy when I’m hungry so I this was a precautionary measure that turned out sweet.) We had the rest of that delicious bread leftover from dinner on Sunday, dipped in a little olive oil, salt, and pepper, and some wine.

I was so happy. We were chatting, reminiscing about past Valentine’s Days, and kissing and I got really emotional and started to cry happy tears.

The lasagna turned out delicious and we ate on the couch while watching an episode of our new show Modern Family. I later thought that it was odd that we ate in front of the TV instead of at the table on Valentine’s Day but we were in the kitchen for so long prepping the meal and washing the dishes that we probably both just wanted to relax on the couch.

Then it was time for the dessert pizza.  We did a little “recon” on Friday night by going to Matchbox and ordering dessert pizza.  OK, we planned to go out to dinner that night to catch up and we hadn’t been to Matchbox in quite a while and chalked it up as “research.” But I’m so glad we did.  Our server was able to shed some light into the icing which we would’ve never gotten close otherwise. We were also able to focus in on some of the flavors to make sure we didn’t forget anything.

Well, the pizza was a success! All the flavors were there: cinnamon, sugar, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, mint, and balsamic reduction.  The dough was very chewy and we’ll probably make some changes to that next time but overall the dessert hit the spot. We were so proud of ourselves. We ate our pizza on the couch while watching another episode of Modern Family.

Honestly, this was a perfect evening. We talked, we laughed, we cooked, we ate delicious food.  We were really connected and really enjoyed each other’s company.  It was different than a normal night because we were technically on a date and neither one of us was expecting to do anything else other than be with each other.

Neither of us wanted the night to end. When I woke up on Wednesday morning, I was bummed that it was all over.  I wanted to stretch the date and stay in our happy, relaxed, connected state. You know, like a long weekend that you just don’t want to end.

Definitely the best Valentine’s Day yet.

How I talk to my husband

Posted on by jplatt27

We had a great Valentine’s Day!  I’m looking forward to sharing it with you all probably tomorrow or Friday.  For now, some thoughts I had on Monday.

Most of the time, my words towards my husband are warm, caring, gentle, loving, encouraging, happy, complimentary, cheerful, appreciative, or pleasant.  I say a lot of “thank you” and “I love you” or just give him a big hug and say “mmm.” This afternoon when we met to hand-off our car, the first thing I said to him was “you look so sexy in a suit.”  So most of the time, I speak kindly to Mike.

But then there are other times when my comments are snappy, short, biting, or accompanied with an eye-roll. These lines of snappiness come out so quickly that I don’t even realize I’m saying them until it’s already stung. And they hurt my husband. I don’t want to speak to any person like that and certainly not Mike.

I don’t know where they come from either. Two examples:

  1. While we were making the cake balls, Mike asked where the sprinkles were. I said “here” or something along those lines and when he turned around and looked for them on the other counter, couldn’t find them and asked again I pointed with head and eyes and said “they’re right here” and rolled my eyes as he picked them up.
  2. This morning I was sitting in bed blogging when Mike came in and turned the heat on. Within 5 minutes, I was really hot and snapped saying something like “it’s so hot in here, can you please turn the heat off?” with a tone of serious urgency. When Mike was like “uh, yeah, sure, what’s with the attitude?” I replied by saying “it’s just so hot in here I can’t stand it” and proceeded to storm out of the room saying that it was “frickin’ ridiculous.”

Like, why do I this?  Clearly, none of these things deserve attitude.  And honestly, sharing my behavior here is a little embarrassing. Luckily, Mike is pretty easy going and lets things roll right off his back. But that doesn’t make these outbursts ok.

I don’t want to get in the habit of treating my husband like this regardless of how infrequent these things are. So what do I do? Try to take a deep breath to compose myself before I make a rude remark? Apologize instantly if I let one slip out? Try to be uber-aware of my facial expressions and keep my eye rolls to a minimum?

I’d love to know:

Do you have moments where you’re snappy like this?  Where do they come from and why do we act like this? How do you rein it in? 

 

 

 

 

My new favorite "toy"

Posted on by jplatt27

Since we’re not saving for a house and focusing on paying down my student loans using Dave Ramsey’s debt snowball method, I’ve been playing around with CNNmoney’s student loan calculator. This thing is seriously like magic!  Before our money conversation, I was doing my own number crunching at Modern Times Coffeehouse at Politics and Prose, my favorite Saturday morning spot. I was so shocked and excited when I clicked calculate that I just had to interrupt the woman sitting across from me and share my findings with her.  Since then, I’ve gone a little farther in my calculations and I wanted to share my new calculations with you!

First, let me explain the debt snowball.  The debt snowball is a pretty easy concept.  Make a list of all of your debts (minus the mortgage) from lowest amount to highest amount.  While still making minimum payments on all accounts, attack the lowest amount by paying as much above the minimum as you can.  Once the smallest loan is paid off, put all the money you were putting to the lowest one, to the next lowest.  Continue until the highest loan is paid off.

My lowest loan amount at the beginning of the year was $1,710.  The minimum payment is $50/month and the interest rate is 6.8%. Put that info into the loan calculator:

At this rate, it will take 3 years and 3 months to pay off this loan.

In our budget conversation we decided to allocate $130 to the loan in addition to the $50 minimum. Then, I realized that we actually had money in our student loan budget line that wasn’t actually being spent each month.  (My interest rates are variable and my monthly payments have gone down over the last few years but I haven’t changed the budget line). So we decided to put that money toward this loan too.  So now, each month we can put $299 towards the loan.  Put that in the calculator:

and we can have this loan paid off by the 4th of July! We’ll also save 83% in interest. Pretty great, huh?

Think that’s cool? Watch this.

Here are the terms for my next smallest loan:

If I continue to pay the minimum each month, I’ll make my final payment summer 2019.

If I use the debt snowball and roll the $299 from loan 1 onto this loan plus its minimum:

we can pay off this second loan by Easter next year!

And it will just get more powerful as the snowball continues to grow through five more loans. I haven’t crunched those numbers yet as I’m sure we’ll have some big expenses/adjustments to our budget in the next few years but this is all very exciting to me.  When I graduated college my goal was to pay off my student loans before my kids go to college. Now, I see it’s possible to pay off them well before that.

So go ahead, I dare you, play around with my new favorite toy. It should work with credit cards and car payments too.

Our pace: what we're not saving for

Posted on by jplatt27

If you missed the post I wrote last week about going at your own pace, I highly recommend reading it here. It’s a good reminder for all of us.

Along the same lines, here’s an example of how Mike and I are going at our own pace.

As a young married couple, the next big step is to buy a house or at least save for one. But, during our money conversation, Mike and I decided to not save money for a house right now.

Prior to this conversation, we had been saving for a house.  That was our big goal. But at the rate we were saving, we wouldn’t be able to buy a house for quite some time, 8 years according to Mint.com.

And besides, we essentially already have a mortgage: my massive student loan debt.

Right around this time I found personal finance guru Dave Ramsey (thanks, Words of Williams!) and started listening to his daily radio show and did a little bit of reading on his website. And I got motivated to pay down my student loans. I couldn’t wait to get my debt snowball rolling.

So as we walked to meet friends for dinner, I suggested this to Mike.  That instead of saving for a down payment, we start putting extra money toward my student loans each month. And Mike agreed. He said he’d been thinking something similar.

As we walked through the city we discussed that we could probably stay in an apartment for another few years and that we probably won’t need or want a yard until our kids are 5 or 6 (which, since they’re not born yet is still quite a bit away).

Our money will add up so much more quickly against my student loans (bye-bye compound interest) than it would in a savings account.  So not only will we feel like we’re succeeding at this goal as we pay off some of the smaller loans but we’ll also be saving ourselves money in the long run.

When we’re ready to buy a house, we’ll have more money to put aside for a down payment because the monthly payments on the loans will be less (and hopefully we’ll make more money each year) and we’ll be more motivated to do it when we feel like it’s in our reach.

So–here we are–a newlywed couple that’s not saving for a house. Probably a little odd.  But we couldn’t be happier with this status.  It feels great that we’re going at our own pace.

Another bonus of this decision is that if we’re not saving for a house, we don’t have to decide where said house will be–something that we felt a lot of pressure to figure out.

I’d love to know:

How are you going at your own pace?

Girl time/guy time

Posted on by jplatt27

I’m back from a long weekend in Florida with my friend Lauren. We planned this trip in the fall and I was so looking forward to the girl time and the sunny weather. We had a great weekend: went for long walks in the morning, did quite a bit of shopping, ate good food, and just talked a lot. As always, it was so good to spend quality time with her.

I love spending time with my girlfriends and I think it’s really important for men and women to have time with their guy friends and girlfriends on a regular basis.  I’ve said before that I think spending time with girlfriends is good for the soul and I truly believe that.

When you’re in a relationship, it’s really important to prioritize your friendships and have girl time and guy time. Honestly, I’m having a hard time articulating why this is important but believe me, it is. It’s good for me to talk and talk and talk with a girlfriend over a glass of wine and dinner. And it’s good for my husband to chat with a buddy over beers and wings.

Because I value and crave girl time so much, I wonder if I may have isolated my husband from my friends.  In the past, friends would ask if Mike was coming along and I’d say “nah” because I just wanted the girl time and quality time with my friend. Now that we’re married I truly do want my friends to know my husband and my husband to know my friends. But I still crave the girl time so I’m not sure how I’ll find that balance.

I’d love to know:

Can you articulate why girl time and guy is so important? (I’m hoping you’ll have the words that are escaping me at the moment.)

How can I bring my husband and my friends together?

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PS–Check out my article on staying cheery in the winter over on Healthy Living Blogs!