144. What I Love, Fear & Dislike About Marriage, Part 1
Meet the Host
Five years ago, after achieving my degrees and teaching as a professor, I was feeling proud that I had checked everything off my life list. But, I wasn’t satisfied in my marriage.
Today, I’m a relationship coach on a mission to resurrect the side of you that got lost in your marriage. Millions of people around the world soak up my content for advice on how to have a more satisfying relationship.
I share what I love, fear, and dislike about marriage in this 2 part series.
As a marriage expert, I think it’s important to consistently be very transparent with my clients and my community about my marriage. I also like to take the opportunity to share what’s on my heart.
So in this episode, I share the top things that I love about marriage. I also start the discussion about what I don’t like about marriage. Come back next week to hear the rest of this conversation!
Click the link to listen, and let me know what you think - I’d love to hear from you!
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Episode Transcript:
Karina: Amigos, welcome back to the Relationship Reset with me, your host, Karina F. Daves, marriage expert and podcast host of this dope podcast.
This episode is going to highlight the top three things that I love, don't like, and fear about marriage. As a marriage expert, I think it's important to consistently be very transparent with my clients, my community, through what I've done over the years, which is display many moments, which I call testimonies in our marriage, where things have either worked out or they haven't. What we've done, how we've rebuilt. And then there are also many opportunities where I share what's on my heart.
Recently, somebody on my team had mentioned to me that some of the feedback that we were getting from our community was not much, but was that you don't hear a lot of my husband's perspective. You only hear mine. Yeah, that's cause it's my page. Sorry. I didn't mean to get all Jersey on you, but it's my page.
And sometimes I will share my husband's perspective, but there's a line that I don't cross because this page was to help and support marriages through my lens, right? Through my experiences, through my expertise. It was never meant for him to come on the platform, you know, even 50 % of the time. And so I think the most that he's on there is through pictures or through B-roll and things of that nature. But ⁓ my husband doesn't even like my content. Like not that he doesn't like it, but I mean, like he doesn't press the like button. So he's not out there watching me. He doesn't view my stories. None of that. He's never even on Instagram. He's more of a YouTuber.
So anyways, I want to get into sharing from my perspective, the top three things that I love, don't like and fear about marriage. So we're going to start with the good stuff. I want to share two things that I love about marriage.
The first is partnership. I was always the kid in school that loved group projects. Even if there was like somebody that was a little bit lazy and didn't pull through, like none of that stuff ever bothered me. I always viewed ⁓ teams as an opportunity to build something beautiful. And I really loved group projects. I worked pretty well solo, but I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I probably talk to myself a lot and I don't mind, you know, just doing research and things of that nature, but partnership ⁓ is something that I grew to ⁓ love over time. I just love building as a team. And for me, I just start to envision a lot of the possibilities that ⁓ more than two people can do.
I also think about partnership, you know, in the sense of biblically, talks about when two or more are gathered. And it just makes me feel like, wow, like when there's more than one of me that has similar values, there is a type of partnership that isn't necessarily there just to aid the loneliness, but is there to aid the part that longs for a partnership for there to be to somebody else. Right. And so for me, I really love marriage because I enjoy being in a partnership. enjoy not the mechanics so much of marriage, like the daily grind, but more so that there is somebody else that I can lean on. There is a soundboard. There is somebody that is a safe place. There is somebody that I can run ideas through. There is somebody else besides me making the decisions. It feels like the burden is lifted in a partnership. And perhaps I should say in the right partnership, it won't feel heavy. And I think plenty of times marriages remain so heavy because the burden is placed on one person. And when burden is placed on just one individual, it feels really lonely, not just heavy, but really lonely. And then you start to think, okay, well, we're not intimate anymore. We don't really talk. We're like passing ships in the night. We're just really good at the mechanics of our relationship. Yeah, that's because your partner feels lonely. They feel like everything is on them, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. So you gotta get your act together.
The second thing that I love about marriage is building a legacy. So Terrence and I, when we got married, we would have a lot of conversations about the dreams that we would have of the things that we wanted to build. And I think that the bills and things like debt and things like checking things off a list can get so much in the way of building that legacy. And what I mean by that is, it's not just about buying the house. It's about possibly having the ability to turn that financial purchase into something much bigger, right? That either can be passed down or sold and multiplied or have it be a safe place of fellowship for your children's friends. Like there has to be something other than the substance that you can touch that creates a feeling that creates a...safe place for folks to go to and say, wow, the Daves family did this. I think that building a legacy is much bigger than donating or throwing money at a cause. Terrence and I are very much the couple that will donate to a cause that we care about and that we feel strongly about. We will see somebody in need and we will, you know, help them out at whatever capacity we can. I'm not saying that that is not important. What I am saying though, is that building a legacy takes much more work than just financially just putting money down.
And for us, we've really wanted to build a legacy that our children felt like they could talk to us. That was very important to us because we both felt like as much as we love our parents, we're going to talk to them. And then two, we very much strongly felt about having a legacy that built financial wealth and financial stability.
And so we made the conscious decision of saying that we weren't really going to support financially huge weddings. You know, we said, we’ll, support your home we’ll support the daycare. But for us, one of our values is we love going to weddings, by the way, but we just feel like that. How do I say this? We just feel like our legacy, our support would be better suited in other areas other than a four hour party. And that's one of our personal values, by the way. And here's the thing. It doesn't mean that we won't give a couple thousand or things of that nature. But we're not paying for half the wedding. That ain't gonna be us. And then a year later, having to also support for a home, no, no, no, no, no. It's not gonna be us.
The last thing we think about with building a legacy is a continuation of our faith. One of the first things that we talked about was faith, food, and culture, we're huge foodies. We wanted our kids to make sure that they knew how to eat and had a strong palate. We wanted to make sure that they were ⁓ exposed to both of our cultures. Me being Peruvian and my husband being black. And then three came our faith. And I think that that's probably the one that we've worked and continue to work the hardest at, because when you're teaching faith to children, you’re coincidentally also working on your own faith, which is pretty interesting. ⁓ And so for us, even at nighttime when we pray with our kids, I always pray that when they do stray away, because they will from God, that they'll always run back to him. And my hope is that my kids and my kids' kids will know how much we prayed for them.
That's a legacy in and of itself and it costs you nothing. It literally costs you no money. ⁓ Okay, now I wanna talk about the things I don't like about marriage. So here are two things that people don't talk about when it comes to what they don't like about marriage.
Number one, I do not like all of the insecurities that marriage brings up. Actually, I don't like all of the insecurities that marriages or being married, excuse me, exposes about myself. I was a very can't nobody tell me nothing independent person before I got married. ⁓ And after I got married, I became very insecure in the sense of physically and even career driven, like I remember just taking a good look at myself and feeling like I wasn't enough, feeling like, dang, we've only been married for a month and all of this could just go right out the window. you know, there's always going to be that initial fear of we may not make it, we may lose. You may cheat on me. I may cheat on you. never know. Like, you know, there's just those like, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what is going to occur in the next couple of years. And I think that it wasn't until about the third year that my husband and I looked at each other and we're like, yo, we made a lifetime commitment to one another, like forever. That's scary. Okay. And people don't talk about that. I had to really go through the insecurities about the way that I looked, my body, whether or not I felt attractive, like all of those things we don't realize how much influences our intimacy, how much it influences how we see our partners, how much it influences the way that we interpret the way our partner talks or treats us. Like it just is so and I hate it so much.
Now the next thing I want to share with you about what I don't like about marriage is also very much not spoken about.
So here goes…
