A Heads Up About This Part Of Marriage Would Have Been Nice
And To The Wifey Doing Her Best, You're Not "Failing"-- You're Becoming.
I think it can feel really easy to lose our autonomy and our individuality when we get married. Especially if you, like me, had chosen to marry young. There is a pressure to be unified in a way that separates you from yourself, your desires and your evolution as a soverign being. It can be a slippery slope for many people, to learn interdependence while also maintaining fulfilling matrimony.
I’ve recently reached 11 years as a wife and I celebrate the milestone. I’m so proud of my relationship and who I’ve chosen as my husband. He makes me a better person because of the way he loves me. The patience he shows, the devotion to our connection, the ability to sit with me in my awful and difficult and questionable moments. It’s partnership. It’s marriage.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. With all this love also comes a hefty dose of heartache and tough conversations and trying to understand while leaving room for misunderstanding. It’s a dance of curiosity and capacity. It’s loving messy and championing our individuality. It’s honoring that we are our own people, choosing to do life together. It’s learning how to mend emotional fractures and build bridges for connection instead of walls of protection.
I am my own before I am a wife. I am a woman before I am a wife. I am a sovereign and autonomous human before I am a wife. This goes for my husband as well. What I expect of myself, I hold him to. What I desire for myself seems only fair to encourage in him. I will not create parameters for “what is allowed” without considering that there are three in the relationship — Me, Him and Us.
To the woman who fears her expansion, her evolution, her desires and her truth, I beg you to lean in with love and curiosity. I ask that you consider the reasons you abandon yourself in the name of proving to someone else that they are worthy of love. I encourage you to consider the cost of living a life that only survives on a dishonest version of you. These are not easy self-reflections. They are quite fucking hard. And guess what? We can do hard things — Thank you Glennon Doyle.
Some Of The Hardest Growth Edges That I’ve Had To Face Inside Of My Marriage
Growing at different speeds:
I remember the first time I felt the strain of the rubber band in my marriage. Never heard of that? Well, picture this — your relationship is an invisible rubber band that wraps around you and your partner — a healthy amount of tension keeps the band secure, but an unhealthy amount of tension can cause the band to go limp and fall to the floor or strain to its snapping point. The healthy tension is mutual desire, interdependence, secure individuation, purpose, etc. The unhealthy tension is the mismatched desire, unwillingness, withdrawing, codependency, animosity, lack of communication or consideration, etc. Some couples cling and become codependent, losing themselves in each other, only to end up so toxic and trauma bonded with the other while their relationship falls. Some couples create distance and become so separate, each reaching for places the other is too convinced they can’t go, that the relationship strains and stretches to its breaking point.
Growing at different speeds felt like a strain that I didn’t know how to soothe. I felt like I was reaching for a life that was reaching for me, but being held back by the person I love the most; who loves me the most. What I desired seemed unreasonable. What I imagined seemed incomprehensible. What I wanted, seemed like it didn’t matter…enough. I was halted and he felt rushed. It didn’t seem fair to force him or coerce him into compliance or uncomfortability to become the person he didn’t agree to marry, initially. But I didn’t want to stay the woman he married, I wanted to grow and evolve and step into a new version — and I wanted to be chosen as her, too. He didn’t want to lose me just as much as he didn’t want to be forced into a version of himself and of us that he didn’t feel ready for.
Growth felt hard, for the both of us, in our individual ways. It was scary to stay still and to step forward.
Desiring more or different, sexually and relationally:
How do you tell your partner that you want more, and different, without feeling like an asshole? Like an ungrateful, selfish, greedy little fucker who wants her cake and wants to eat it too?
The only way I know how is by accepting that feeling like a greedy asshole and being honest, is going to get you an answer one way or another.
I thought that keeping quiet about what I wanted sexually and intimately inside of my marriage was the only way to keep the peace. — and baby was I wrong about that. The chaos I felt inside was ruining my connection with my husband. I was making love to him while my mind drifted elsewhere just to not physically repel. I was following every IG hottie and imagining what they’d be like. I was seeking connection in ways that felt almost morally wrong because I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted. Because I felt like asking was worse than feeling dissatisfied.
I spiraled into guilt, frustration, anger and sadness all because I wanted variety.
It’s like having Spaghetti Bolognese every day for the rest of your life. After a while, it isn’t going to sound so appealing. But give yourself the entire Italian menu to choose from and maybe the rotation of the Bolognese will be a welcomed dish. (Also this is not about polyamory or opening the marriage, this is simply a metaphor for monotony or predictability within relationships.)
Monotony aka “The Slow Death”:
“Till’ death do us part,” “As long as we both shall live,” these are not idle statements. I said them, you may have also, or some variation of the two. So, what does that mean exactly? It means that you’re going to be down bad for this human for a long fucking time.
Do y’all know how bored I get watching these movie length tv show episodes? Do y’all understand that my ADHDon’t mind me leaves a tab open in my brain palace for every random thought I have throughout the day… indefinitely? I change my hair at least twice a year, chop that bitch right off every time it thinks about reaching my lower back. I’ve done every MLM boss-babe season, changed the name of my podcast three times, go shopping for hours just to put back everything in my cart— for funsies, traveling is in my DNA and pretty sure I'd lose my shit if I didn’t have a crush on at least one person other than my husband.
I call this the “slow death” because that is exactly what it can feel like; being alive, but not living. Watching yourself through some omnipresent lens and seeing the paths ahead of you withering away. Day-in-and-day-out, this unconscious cycle of routine that gradually chips away at your spirit, your curiosity, your desire. It’s sameness, it’s tedious it’s void of change or growth — It’s Groundhog Day for your relationship.
It’s space couples go to diiiieeeee *laughs devilishly* — not really, but the relationship might if it gets stuck there.
I’m not saying that it’s healthy to bypass the growth that can come from seasons of monotony. Because how can you really say your marriage can endure, if you don’t stretch it a little? If you don’t sit in the trenches of dullness and boredom a time or few? — I’ve definitely learned a shit ton about myself in these moments and I’m grateful for it!
All of this to say, when we take the vow to love and honor and care for our person from this day forward, we’re vowing to love them through the inevitable monotony and boredom that comes with the security of a steady and life-long relationship.
And no one…I repeat, no one talks about how fucking hard that’s going to be.
Communicating before Combustion:
Ha! The blowouts we used to have are actually wild to me now. I remember the first time I lost my shit on my husband — we ran a photography business together; with him being the photographer and me being the studio manager. We were doing some back-end at a coffee house and he made some inconsiderate comment about my position and it set me off. I walked out on him, called an Uber to pick me up, and we proceeded to have a whole blow out on the side walk — not our finest moment.
After months of holding in that I felt like I was disregarding my own projects, becoming a background player in my own life and career, biting off more than I could chew and feeling required to do so, feeling unappreciated, and then feeling dismissed — I blew tf up. I remained quietly boiling for months and all it took was one comment, in the heat of a stressful day, to send me into full combustion. It was messy, hurtful and ultimately led to us no longer working with each other in that capacity.
One of the key proponents to a thriving partnership is the desire and ability of conscious communication.
Listening to understand, not glossing over to respond. Hearing with the intention of offering support and taking accountability. Speaking with compassion, kindness, integrity and vulnerability.
We don’t communicate by trying to prove that we are “right.” We communicate to build a bridge rather than a wall.
The lesson I’ve had to learn the hard way, is that building that bridge takes much more time initially, but once it’s built it’s easier to meet each other on either side and even in the middle. The wall will always get in the way.
Embracing my eroticism:
I have been familiar and connected to my eroticism my entire life. I said I wanted to be one of two things “when I grew up” — An entertainer; a singer and an actress or a sex therapist — like Barbara Streisand in Meet the Fockers.
When I decided to become a sex, love and relationship coach, I remember feeling like it was going to fundamentally change me all while bringing me closer to who I truly am. I knew it would expand who I’d been conditioned to be and I was excited about that. What I was nervous for was how the new version of me would maneuver inside of the container of my partnership.
I was worried about how it would affect my marriage and ultimately my connection with my husband. At this point we’d been married for 4 years and our life together felt secure, loving and supportive. Our sex felt — enjoyable. It was constant, had depth, it was mostly predictable and often started and ended based off of my husband’s penis.
After diving into this genre of profession; multiple certifications + a pretty intense retreat in the jungle of Costa Rica, I was cracked open. I no longer wanted the kind of sex I was having, I wanted transcendence. I wanted to explore more deeply, fuck more wildly, play with power and dive into the carnal. — That’s a lot to ask of someone when they haven’t experienced the kind of awakening you have.
The amount of tears, frustration, yearning, confusion, aching, craving, anger and uncertainty that comes with this kind of wanting is often a space of rupture inside of marriages.
How do you hold space and lean into something one person knows to be available, while the other is clueless of its existence?
Permission and curiosity.
Individuating and finding interdependence:
Relationships are human mirrors for our individual growth. I often tell my clients that much of couple’s work, is individual work. We are at our best when we learn to create the type of self-awareness, accountability and love for ourselves, that fosters our ability to show up in partnership with presence, compassion and care.
The journey to this point in my marriage was not an easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy one, by any means. We did not always make lemonade with the lemons life gave us — sometimes we sliced them open and squeezed them into each other’s eyes.
We love someone for who they are, not for what we want them to be for us. Not for how they can fulfill a projection of our relational wounding. We love someone by remaining curious about who they BE. Now and always. We create a container for expression and expansion and find the beauty in their musings. The compliments in the way they choose to see life.
I believe that the bravest thing we can do as partner’s is learn to love the way your partner see’s the world. When we can make their individuation a green flag, or when we can learn to mutually rely on each other along side the security within ourselves, we make a home that keeps the light on.
Wife to Wife You’re Not Failing — You’re Becoming:
And I see you. I see the woman who refuses to settle for a life half-lived, who craves, who wants to be seen, felt, and loved as the full, wild, ever-evolving woman she is.
I witness you navigating the messy, the mundane, the magnificent — growing into your own skin, claiming your desires, and making space for your pleasure.
And I know it’s not always easy. It’s a dance, a tug-of-war, a constant renegotiation of who you are, who they are, and what you two together are becoming.
Wife to wife — you’re doing amazing. You know it. You feel it in your bones. And your marriage? Your partnership? It can hold all of you. What they don’t know how to always say is that they love the woman you were, the woman you are, and the woman you’re becoming.
You can be the permission slip. Let them witness the you that’s unfolding. Let them meet you where you are, again and again, in all your becoming. Let them grow with you, side by side, not as an obligation, but as an invitation.
Because this is what love looks like: not perfection, but presence. Not agreement on everything, but a willingness to keep showing up, even when it’s messy.
You’re not failing, babygirl. You’re desiring. You’re expanding. You’re alive.
And you’re doing so damn good.
💚Bri
I'm Brianna Endrina, mentor for women and lovers in coupledom. A sort of mating n' relating connoisseur, if you will. I'm here to guide you — and your boo, towards confident eroticism & nourishing partnership!
It’s not just about sex, it’s about sex worth having! It’s about sustainability andpassion. It’s about deeply connected, honest intimacy. It’s about learning be fully expressed, safely loved and well-f*cked for yourself and with each other.
It’s time to ditch the old narrative and step into a life of turn on! Get pleasure, encouragement, accountability and all the sexy empowerment at your fingertips! Get on-demand coaching with me through Pocket Pleasure! No more settling, you deserve EPIC!
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i understand the pain of this journey so hard, you explain it so beautifully and i love the deeply embodied wisdom you bring ♥