Watch by Malaya Co. from FashionValet

Dean and I are coming to our 9-year anniversary of…ugh… I find the phrase “falling in love” so tacky, but yes, that. I can’t tell you how much I love and respect this man of mine, and it’s really crazy how the feeling grows even more as days pass by. People ask me how I work with my husband, come home with him, sleep with him, wake up with him, go to work with him, weekends with him, weekdays with him.. hehe. I tell them it’s not enough!

This relationship of ours is still a mystery to me. How God can put so much love between two people who see each other all the time and not get sick of each other, I pray that dynamic will never stop. I really think it comes from genuine respect. Dean has never uttered a bad word to me, has never called me bad names, has never wished anything bad upon me, and has never swore in front of me. And vice versa. Yes, he scolds me if I do something wrong, but even his scolding is done with a lot of respect and reasoning. Respect is key, I think, in keeping the love alive. If you lose respect, the love fades pretty quickly and it will be hard to undo that.

Anyway, recently our work has divided us a bit. As FashionValet expands quickly and there are so many areas and divisions to look after, Dean has been working double as hard and I hardly see him during the day. 3 years back, we’d go to meetings together, but now we pretty much have to divide to conquer. As cheesy as it sounds, this makes me miss him during the day. The driver would send me home earlier than Dean because I need to put on Mom cap, so I look forward to when Dean comes through the house doors. Daniel and I would race to the door to see who gets to Daddy first. Mariam probably crawled 3 steps from her original position, she isn’t too excited about Daddy’s homecoming.

So since I don’t know much about his day, we have this new thing we came up with. I’m sharing because I imagine most of you work separately, so things like this might be good to keep each other in the loop without sharing too much about work. It’s not about work, just about your day.

Before we sleep, we have to share one thing we are unhappy about, and three things that we are happy about. Could be anything! Work was stressful, lunch was really good, happy you bought a new pen haha, anything! And of course, the positives have to outweigh the negatives, so three good vs one bad. Pretty soon, you will start to pick up the little happy things in your daily life and realise that the bads are never that bad.

 The only downside to this new thing is that both of you are usually sleepy by this time, so if one of you is chatty (i.e. me) it’s most likely the other one is no longer listening.

Our convos go like this:

Dean: I’m unhappy about..hmmm… x. I’m happy that…y. I’m also happy that… z. Then my last happy thing is… a.

Me: Ok my turn. I’m unhappy about this bla bla. You know, because today I went here and… bla bla bla… So you can see why I’m unhappy right? I just don’t understand why bla bla bla and he/she said bla bla bla. Why do you think it happened that way bla bla bla….

Dean: Mmmm…

Me:  Wait are you listening? I haven’t even told you my three Happys. Are you… are you asleep? Because if you’re asleep, you are going on my Unhappy for tomorrow night.