Marriage Lessons Learned During the Pandemic

Hi Guideposts, I’m Kristy Dewberry. And my story is about how our marriage survived during the COVID outbreak when we were sheltering in place.

We’ve been married 38 years and the last couple of years I’ve wondered what it’s going to be like when my husband retires and he’s home with me all day. I’ve worked from home the last 15 years, running an eBay business. So I’m used to having the house to myself.

So when the COVID outbreak started, my husband’s boss sent the employees to work from home and it gave me a preview of what it might be like.

The first couple of weeks were pretty annoying. My husband felt compelled to tell me that I was loading and unloading the dishwasher incorrectly. And then following that, he felt inclined to let me know about his superior hand-washing technique, which is still under debate to this day.

But after a couple of weeks, I began to realize, as I was praying to God, for God to change my husband, that perhaps I needed to change myself. I walked by the restroom one day and he was putting the cap back on our toothpaste tube and I realized I had left it off that morning. In the early years of our marriage, this would really annoy him, the way I would lose things, leave lids and caps off of things. But I had just realized that he never complains about that anymore. And I asked him about it and he told me that he loves me and so all of these traits I have–he calls them Kristyisms, and he loves them because they’re part of who I am.

So I realized at that point, rather than praying for Donald to change, I needed to embrace his Donaldisms and become more accepting of his traits. So he’s back at work now. And I have to say, I still enjoy having some time to myself but I do know that once he does retire I’m also going to enjoy my time with him.