Today’s post comes from Divine Caroline writer S. Devo.

I met my husband in high school and he graduated a year before me. We got married my senior year and we were madly in love. However, shortly after we began living together, I realized that I did not know him very well. I noticed things about him that I did not notice while were dating. Perhaps I did not notice because I was too young to recognize characteristics of a potential husband at eighteen.

The biggest thing that bothered me about him though was the fact that he could not openly communicate his emotions or feelings with me. Marriage is so difficult, especially when you are just kids trying to figure out the way of the world and marriage at the same time. I wanted and needed to share my thoughts, worries, feelings, concerns, and emotions with him. I wanted to lay in bed at night and talk about our marriage and my struggles in life or just hash things out. He would simply clam up or shut me out.

Eventually, I began to take it personally and I felt that he did not care about me because he would not participate in emotional conversation with me. I started to prod him with questions about his feelings toward me. This made him clam up more than ever. His inability to share and communicate with me was so bad that about six months into our marriage, I contemplated divorcing him. I needed someone to vent my feelings to and I lived far, far away from my friends and family and I felt so alone and depressed. Marriage was not what I thought it would be and I was miserable.