How to Test Your Marriage

There are two ways to test your marriage. One test shows you just how bad things are. The other shows you how good things have become.

Test #1: Take a vacation together. I can always tell when a couple is about to split up by the stories they tell me post vacation. If their stories revolve around the fights that erupted and how terrible their vacation was, I know it won’t be long. Vacations generally are times when we place very little stress on ourselves and our marriages. We’re away from the hassles of work. We’re usually in a pretty place. People are generally waiting on us. And we don’t have to do laundry, cook, or cut the grass. There’s little to fight about.

Test #2: Go through a hard time together. Sometimes life is relatively easy. Other times it’s anything but. It doesn’t matter if you’re suffering from health stress, financial stress, work stress or something else. If you can come together and communicate through it, you know you’ve managed to build a strong union.

My marriage has gone through Test #2 during the past two weeks. I’m happy to say that we seem to be passing the test. I’m not as happy to say that the test seems to be still in progress.

About two weeks ago, my kid caught a cold with a hacking cough. It progressed to the flu with an extremely high fever. This then turned into pneumonia. She’s been up coughing most nights for the past 14 days, which means no one in this house has been sleeping—not even the dog. School has been missed. Doctor waiting rooms have been sat in. And lots of drugs have been administered to a kid who shut her mouth, covered it with her hands and said she would take them over her dead body.

Somewhere in the midst of all of that, the dog developed a double ear infection and I lost one of my kid’s brand new school books.

By midday yesterday, however, my kid was calling me boring, lazy and mean. I figured she was cured and would be going back to school soon.

Then in the evening she asked me why she was so itchy and had red bumps all over her stomach. It was hives. She’s apparently allergic to penicillin. This is no surprise. All of the women on my side of the family have severe allergies. I walk around with an epi pen.

So I called the after hours line for her doctor and I got a triage nurse. She told me to give the kid Benadryl and call during normal business hours. This advice didn’t sound right to me, but I really hadn’t slept in two weeks, you know? Nothing sounded right to me at that moment. I followed her orders, but I had a sick sense that I really should be taking the kid to the ER. After all, that’s what my allergist always tells me to do when I have an allergic reaction.

Around this time, I started eating baby carrots. I don’t know why. I suppose it was some sort of healthy self soothing thing. In the process, I accidentally bit off most of my bottom lip. That’s always fun.

At some point last night, around the time my husband and I were watching Criminal Minds, I heard a thump. He heard it, too. It sounded like a door closing. But our daughter was asleep. How could a door be closing?

He got up and walked around the house. As he was doing it, I was thinking about how I’d come home and found the backdoor unlocked and ajar just the night before. We’d both assumed that one of us had accidentally left it that way. But now? Now I was thinking that my husband was about to get hit over the head with an axe while I sat on the couch in a comatose, sleep deprived state—too lazy to even pick up a phone and be ready to speed dial 911. I was also thinking that this is exactly what my friend and colleague Mary Ellen O’Toole, PhD, a former FBI profiler, says not to do in her book Dangerous Instincts.

And then I was thinking that if someone murdered our whole family, at least Mary Ellen would get involved and the killer would probably be found, caught and jailed. That was strangely comforting.

I thought all of this very calmly, as only a snookered sleep deprived person can.

My husband returned from his search. There was no axe sticking out of his head. He could not locate the source of the thump.

Still the dog was seriously agitated. He was pacing and whining and his fur was up. I tried everything to calm him. Nothing worked.

We all finally went to sleep.

As I closed my eyes, I thought, “That dog knows something. There’s probably a serial killer in the closet and I am going to die because I was too sleep deprived to do anything about it.”

But I didn’t die. I woke at 6 am. My husband was gently tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “I figured out what that noise was last night.”

A pipe had burst. It had filled a good section of the basement ceiling with water. The ceiling had collapsed. There was water, ceiling tiles and mold everywhere.

It’s just what someone wants to wake up to at 6 am.

On the bright side, I now know why our basement has smelled so musty lately.

So now the water is turned off, I have “call plumber” on my to-do list, I’m about to make another run at the basement with the shop vac, and I’m waiting for the doctor’s office to open so I can ask about the hives.

I have a huge deadline coming up for work, too. Did I mention that? And I’m just sure–absolutely sure–that something else is about to tax us even more. Because that’s how life is. Suffering comes and suffering goes, but it never goes away for good. And there are much worse things. Much, much worse things. We’re fortunate. I tell myself that everyday.

We’re strong. We can handle this and anything else. It feels good to know that.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, I have learned that 1) my kid didn’t have an allergic reaction after all. She just happens to have a viral rash on top of everything else. 2) We need a new dishwasher. I’ll just add that to the list. The AC broke earlier in the year and we still haven’t replaced it. We will soon be pioneers, I’m sure. 3) The sight of inch-thick of mold makes me sick.

Readers: I’m going to take a few days or more off. The September reader of the month has decided to donate her prize winnings to someone else. The winnings are an Orlando theme park pass and a copy of Project: Happily Ever After. To be in the running to get her prize, all you have to do is comment on this post before I blog again, which is estimated to be sometime toward the end of next week. In your comments, talk about how stress affects your marriage for the better or worse.

NOTE: You can read more about Dangerous Instincts, which is a must-read book that I helped to write, at DangerousInstincts.com. Or you can read tips that Mary Ellen has for reporters on how to conduct better interviews. Or you can find out five things crime shows get wrong.

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