Forget The Fairytale — My Wife is The Real Deal

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The Habit Stacker

8 min readOct 28, 2016

The issue with love and marriage today is that it has been turned into romantic movies when they really should be comedies. We all know the movies that always end with a forever after that make you smile and cry. What these movies forget is that life itself is messy. The idea of finding one person to love and riding with them to the end is unfathomable to many these days because our idea of marriage has been messed up. Many say they don’t believe in marriage, but I am going to switch it up. I am going to tell you why my wife is a rockstar because the positives of this world seem to be overshadowed by the darkness.

All you read about now is divorce and doom and gloom of marriage. You read about all the negatives in the world, but I am going to write about the one thing that is always positive in my life. She is not a positive because she is perfect, or because we make passionate love to each other all of the time.

Do I wish we could have more sex? You know it! ( had to throw that in there just incase she reads this)

We have been married for two years which is nothing compared to the 25+ year marriage for my parents and the 40+ for her parents. In those two years though, we have been through a crazy amount together. We lived in Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arizona and we are not in the military.

We don’t have this false save me from all my problems with your perfect self-expectations of each other. Most days I wake up and wonder how she can watch the dumbest shows on TV, and she wonders how I can stare at my computer screen for crazy hours.

Here is the thing, she seriously watches the weirdest shows. She watches these olden day English movies with no black people. Like seriously, back in the times when we were only allowed to work in the yard and hang from trees for discipline purposes. Awwwwwwwwkward!

My wife is a rockstar though and here is why:

“Where Ever You Go I Am With You”

With her actions, she tells me this daily. She graduated from college and moved to Oklahoma, and I screwed up her career. She needed to be an athletic training graduate assistant, but because I was in Oklahoma trying to keep being an athlete, she did not have many options.

She had to take a horrible job because of this.

I made $10,000 Canadian which was $7,000 American! Here is how you know this is a bad! When I was trying to get a car, I told the dealer my income and he asked a month? I had to say no a year, and I remember saying it with proudness trying to maintain that last shred of dignity in that moment. Needless to say, I did not get the car. His face was priceless, though he wanted to laugh at me and I don’t blame him.

She made $15,000 per year. We lived off of $21,000 which is on the poverty line, and we laughed every day about it. Just writing this brings water to my eyes because wherever I was, she was with me. She was not with me because of anything that I could offer her other than me.

Financially it gets more fun. I convinced her to go to massage school, and she did. It costs $6,500. We asked both of our parents to help us out because we didn’t know how in the world we were going to do it. I think they both chipped in $200, meaning we had to come up with the other $6,100. I told her just to trust me to get it done, and she was with me. She went to school somehow we cut back and paid cash for every single payment for school.

She graduated got a second job as massage therapist that she hated and at this point I quit track and decided to get a real job because she had given everything to me and I wanted to be able to provide more. I got a corporate job as a project manager. Got my business casual clothes all ready and went off for the first day of work as the only black guy that worked on the business side and not in the factory. I hated every single day of my life for the first time!

Every morning I would leave for work and say to Emily, “Welp, I am off to slavery today.” I was joking to her, but I meant it deep down. I felt like I was a slave to $36,000. I was living for “security” even if it made me unhappy. I was not really about that life.

During my time there I started a business with my wife making custom made ties. We should not have done this because we are both not fashionable people, but when you feel like you are a slave worker, you will use anything as an excuse to get out. After three months on my first “career job,” I quit, and my wife was with me.

Wherever You Sleep I Am With You

When she is with me, she does not do it because she has to be! She is with me all of the way because she really believes in me and this is a hard thing to fake.

We both quit our jobs and we moved to Kansas with no jobs, no plan, and $3000 in the bank. We had the time of our life every day. It was weird because we just spent a lot of time together making ties, but we didn’t have any money to enjoy things.

We could not afford a dresser.
We slept on a SINGLE air mattress.

We had nothing but each other and our Honda Civic that we should never have bought!

I wanted to speak at schools in Kansas and begin my rockstar speaking career. I am an Olympian right; they will pay me to come and drop some wisdom. I sent out about 70+ emails and got two responses back. One was a maybe, and the other was a no.

She slept with me every night, and she never complained. She never called me out or made me feel like crap. She never said what everyone else was saying, but she just believed in me. When you have a woman that will laugh her ass off with you as you blow up your air mattress that deflated from the night before, you have something special.

It does not matter where we sleep because she is with me. If she has to sleep on the floor, it is a drag, but if it’s with me, she calls it the nest and she gets excited about it!

Whatever You Eat I Am With You

Our account was down to our last couple hundred dollars. My wife was still with me. I was failing. Our business was not failing, but we were not selling fast enough for our situation.

Money was tight, so I had to save money with food, but I also did not want to make her eat like crap. I decided the answer was to convince myself that I was a vegetarian. If we stopped eating meat, then we could save that money and still eat healthily.

She went along with it. She looked at me every day as I prepared beans, veggies and rice and her eyes said: “Whatever you eat, I am with you.” I appreciated that to the max. She didn’t even look at the bank account. She just knew I would find a way.

No matter how hard you cry I will cry with you

2016 started off with the loss of my childhood friend. It ripped me up inside to my core. My man was 25 years old like me. I cried so hard one day that I was basically yelling in her chest. She just held me and cried with me. She didn’t say anything to me. She was with me, and her tears comforted me. Life is messy, but she is willing to get on her knees and clean it up with me. When I get sad about him, she just gets sad with me and stays with me and listens to my stories about him.

No Matter How Hard You Work I Am With You

Here is the thing, I know without a doubt that I have workaholic tendencies. Ok, let’s be a real, I love to grind! Workaholic life is great when you are single, not great when you are married. From day one she never harassed me about this. She just looked at me and said “no matter how long you work I am with you.” A lot of women want a hard worker until they work hard and don’t have all the time in the world for them, then hard work sucks!

After moving to Arizona, I knew that I needed to do something to stack a bit more money up. I had a full-time job, a social media business pulling in some side income, but I had some skills I needed to better in sales. I got a second full-time job which consisted of working evenings and weekends. I would get on the calls day in and out, and I would be so freaking tired. Emily was home all day in, and she was bored. We could not eat dinner together, which was weird for us, and I did not get to talk to her much at all because I worked from 3:10 AM — 10:00 PM.

She looked at me with the same eyes and had the same message.
She was with me.
She is always with me.

I knew for a long time that her heart wanted to be back in the Midwest. The problem was that I had a big project that I put the last year of my life into and leaving it incomplete was just not an option for me. I did everything that I could do to get it all finished.

I got the project finished and it was time to let her know, I was with her no matter what.

We just go
No jobs
No place to live
Much more money than last time (hah hah I learned from the last time)

All of our stuff had shipped in a pod. We sat in an empty apartment together. Emily spread the sheets on the floor to create the fake bed aka the nest. She jumped on the floor into the nest wanting me to jump after her as she giggled. She looked back at me and her eyes said