I’ve been (mostly) happily married for 32 years.

Today I want to tell you about the time that my marriage felt like a cold, steel cage and nearly became a statistic.

It was, naturally, during the “7 Years of Cages” period of my life and one of the hardest ones to get out of.

I spent that period of my life working for companies that were sucking the life out of me (think “death of a thousand cuts”), so I didn’t start out from a great place. But according to my LIFE PLAN (cue God/Goddess laughing), it was time to start trying to have a baby and I wasn’t getting any younger.

Because of where I worked and the career cage I was still in, I was semi-miserable and exhausted and wasn’t taking care of my body at all. (The chronic black circles under my eyes made me look like an old goth or a raccoon.) I was bingeing on sugar and caffeine to keep myself upright and to cope with life. (Did you know that caffeine is a coping mechanism? I found that out in college but I don’t really recommend it anymore…)

I was steadily becoming a train wreck on the inside, although I still looked pretty good on the outside. Only people very close to me had any idea I was in deep water and sinking fast. I’d had years of practice from childhood in looking like I was FINE, so it came easily.

Back to my marriage. We had been married for 8 years before we had our first child, so we had a lot of things worked out before the s*** hit the fan. This turned out to be a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that we were solidly in love and knew each other very well. The curse is that we expected things between us to stay the same forever.

Spoiler Alert: The blessing saved us, but the curse almost killed us.

When I became pregnant, my attention became much more inner-focused as I was aware of the baby growing inside me. That’s when I started to pay less attention to my husband. At the same time, he started to pull away because of this and other reasons. I had no idea what was happening to us, but it scared me in the pit of my stomach because I could feel him withdrawing and felt helpless to stop it. Helplessness is not a feeling I’m very comfortable or familiar with, but I could only watch things fall apart in slow motion as time passed.

I had even worse insomnia as I became increasingly afraid for my marriage, doubted my choices, and felt shame that my life was falling apart in yet another area where I felt caged. The distance grew between us, so my first person to turn to for support was unavailable. I felt so alone and too shameful to talk about it to anyone else in my support system, so I made it even harder than it had to be on myself.

After the baby came, I felt empty, isolated, afraid, and confused about my marriage at a time when I thought I should (and wanted to) feel joyful- surely what I sensed wasn’t really happening, was it? It was incredibly painful and I could feel actual pain in my heart when I thought about it for even a minute. I tried to reach out to him but he was still resistant and denied that there was a problem. I was overwhelmed and irritable; I knew he was lying.

I couldn’t believe that it was all falling apart and I thought it was my fault for wanting more than I already had in the first place by having a baby.

After about 8 months of this, everything came out in a flood. It was awful and all of my fears were confirmed. Our marriage was truly in crisis and at a breaking point. I hadn’t made a point to prioritize him and the baby. He was hurt and overwhelmed by my behavior and things from his past that he’d never shared before had preoccupied him and left him terrified of being a parent. This had caused him to pull away instead of talking to me, which left me feeling hurt and abandoned so I pulled away too. This was the vicious cycle we found ourselves in.

It took a lot of time and courage, a lot of painful conversations, and developing skills to handle our challenges, but in the end, we were able to finally understand and appreciate each other again and create a stronger marriage than before. (The love never died, but love alone isn’t enough to make a marriage work.)

Bottom line: We both grew up more (the hard way) and our marriage matured. It’s not without conflicts and areas we still need to grow, but we’re aware in a way that we weren’t before.

The fantasy marriage we had before was beautiful, but too much stress made it unstable. The fantasy itself turned out to be a big piece of the cage. My clinging to it kept me from being able to grow. I had to look at things a different way to finally get free.

How is the intimate relationship in your life? Is it smooth sailing? Does it need a tune-up? An overhaul? I get it. It’s OK to share, it might even be a key.