In Conversation with a married man

Friday’s at work has become my new favourite thing. This week we had a Mental Health Week where we celebrated the importance of good health and wellbeing at work. One of the things that was encouraged during the week was to grab 15 minutes with a person that you wanted to get to know better and just have a chat.

I choose — Ippy.

Ippy is some craic. He joined the company maybe 2–3 months ago (clearly I’m not into the detail here), and he is in the finance team. My good friend from this team told me how excited she was for him to join, so I was already looking out to meet him.

I got to chat with Ippy for the first time during our company offsite where I got to see his lightness, warmth and experience his laughter from the deepest parts of his belly. Ippy loves to live. He loves to embrace what comes for him and he does have a very positive calmness about him.

This Friday we spoke about relationships, fears, raising children and influences from our grandmothers.

What are your fears?

I had three fears in my life and three big decisions that I was not very sure about, but had to fully embrace:

1. Asking my wife to marry me — that’s a big question because I’m asking someone to embrace my safety, for me to protect and to also share my life with.
2. On the day of my wedding — the decision and thought process there was — what if tomorrow I’ll win a million in the lotto, 1/2 of that goes to her. Everything from that moment forward is a split between two people, everything is together and it’s a responsibility to be prepared for.
3. Having a child — questions like, ‘is this the right time?’ ‘Do I have enough money?’ ‘Can I do it?’

I embraced each decision by surrendering to it, by fully embracing it and saying “let’s go”.

My fear is also to sit across a long table from my wife and the love to be fully gone, how would I deal with it? How do I embrace that? I simply enjoy every single moment that I have with her. And if tomorrow she decides to go, if she decides to leave me, then I know that I have created beautiful memories and beautiful moments for us to cherish.

What values do you have as a couple?

We come from two different cultures, even though we are both from Africa, my background is the man of the household, where from hers, the women is the heart behind the man that is the strength. There were moments were we rubbed each other the wrong way, there were times where we fought to the point of getting to such place where anger took over fully. That was a lightbulb moment. The moment of “lets stop changing one another”

She is all about the bigger picture. I am all about the detail. We started to really embrace that and work as a team. We stopped trying to control and change the otherperson to be just like them.

Our values are simple and we strongly live by them:

1. Our Faith — Love God more than you love me. I will never be able to love her more then God loves her and it’s very important for us to share our faith and appreciation. Our pastor gave us this book that helped us to understand and appreciate one another.
2. Divorce — we don’t believe in divorce. Divorce is simply not an option. Walking away is not an option. There are solutions to our moments of disagreements.
3. Trust — the rule is simple. If you get to a place where you are in bed with another person, that’s it. Trust is broken. No repairing that.
4. Talk. Respect — raising voice is not a thing. Discussion over. If you start raising a voice or get angry to the point where another person is not able to understand you, then the conversation is finished there. Take one year to fully express how you feel, but don’t walk away or raise voice. Respect comes just from there.
5. Fun — now. We have fun. We really do. Internal jokes, embracing happiness.

We spoke about our values. We created them. We embrace them. The way we work is we write our own story. There is so much advice that people can give you and so many different ways people can influence you, but at the end of the day this is your life and you should embrace living it your way, so we have decided to create our own story.