#53 25 Reasons Why I’ve Been Happily Married for 25 Years
On the day of her 25th wedding anniversary, Kelly pauses to reflect on her marriage. From learning to let go of her ego, to understanding energy and soul connections, she realises that they were both guided to be in the same place at the same time in order to meet each other and that their challenges are also gifts.
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Episode 53 of the project me podcast. Hi guys. Welcome back today. My husband and I celebrate 25 years of marriage. If you followed the show from the very beginning, you might recall in episode two where I shared the story of getting out of the abusive relationship with my ex and then meeting Luca in London, just as I've been considering moving back to California.
Yeah. I discovered the Sivananda Yoga Center. I did a course there on positive thinking and it shifted my vibration enough to attract the true love of my life to enter. Two girlfriends, Sue and Sarah, dragged me out on a Saturday night to a posh bar and club, not the kind of place I'd ordinarily have ever gone to.
And that's the night I saw Luka. Across the crowded bar and our eyes connected and we felt the energy that was in 2006 and we were married two years later and we had our first child a year after that, now that I know so much more about soul plans and soul contracts and divine intervention and synchronicities, I believe.
We were both guided to be in the same place at the same time. How could we have both been at the same bar, seen each other across the crowded room, each leave at different times without speaking to each other, then both turn up at the same club later that night and recognize each other from our earlier moment of eye contact.
We're talking about a huge city, London, with countless other ways this could have played out. And it turns out. that in this huge capital city, we both lived in the same part of town and shopped at the same supermarket. We were lined up to meet each other and it sure wasn't going to happen at the Shivananda Yoga Center.
Instead, I had to be dragged out to the kind of place he'd be in, which wasn't my kind of place at all. I'm imagining our angels overseeing the amount of times we just missed each other down different aisles at the supermarket. And how delighted they must have been when it finally happened at the club.
Five years ago, when I was still writing my blog at myprojectme. com, I wrote a post for our 20th wedding anniversary called 20 Reasons I've Been Happily Married for 20 Years. Now that I've moved from blogging to podcasting, I'm going to review those original 20 reasons and add on 5 more. I wonder if five years from now podcasting will give way to some other new thing that we don't even know about yet.
I never imagined I'd have a podcast five years ago. Or maybe AI will take over and write my additional five reasons for me in five years. Hmm. So, I'm looking at this original blog post from 2018 and I'd written at the start, as my husband and I celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary this week, I'm reflecting on our marriage, especially as we sadly see many other couples our age splitting up.
And I'll add now in 2023 that I did a head count recently of how many of my friends are divorced now, and I think I counted Around 20, maybe a little bit more than 20. We do have a very large pool of friends and it keeps increasing as we move to new places. The most common reason for all these breakups was, I hate to say it, infidelity.
All except one, uh, was the man who was unfaithful. There was only one instance of the female being unfaithful. And all of these breakups happened when the kids were still school aged. And I'm happy to say that many are now remarried or in much better relationships than their original ones. All had a hard time during the marital breakup, for sure, and all are happier now on the other side of it, even those who are single.
Because being in a relationship with the wrong person is incredibly draining. Luca and I definitely consider ourselves very happily married, but that's not to say we don't work on it or that we take each other for granted. I constantly remind both of us that we are two separate people with two different upbringings, experiences, personalities, which we means that we simply aren't going to see eye to eye on everything and we definitely don't.
We have had our smooth sailing periods where we're feeling totally loved up and connected. And that's interspersed with. patches of heavy showers or even storms. Then just like weather patterns it all clears up and the sun shines again. So here are my 25 reasons why I've been happily married for 25 years.
Number one, I have a great relationship with myself first and foremost. By creating my project Me, I take time to get to know and understand my emotions and behaviors which puts me in a better position to understand his. If I were living in autopilot, just busy, busy, busy with no time for myself and no checking in with my eight key life areas, including that little monthly assessment of our marriage, things could have had time to fester and grow before I was even properly aware of it.
If you aren't doing a monthly Project Me Lifewheel check in, I really encourage you to download it from MyProjectMe. com. It's free and it works. Number two. Ever since the kids were tiny, he's always given me the gift of weekend lie ins and time to meditate and journal and have the essential me time I need to be my best self.
This is hugely important to me. He gets that. He gets it that I need a lot of alone time. And if he walks into the bedroom and he can see I'm meditating, he's mostly pretty good about letting me be same with me being deep in a journaling session. Yeah, he gets my need for me time. Number three, we made a pact when we started a family that we would never become so child centered that we put each other last.
We created plenty of we time. Going out without the kids, having fun, talking about stuff not related to home life. It kept us feeling fun and interesting and interested. When we didn't have a babysitter, I'd organize a candlelit date in our living room after the kids were tucked up in bed. I'd slip into something a bit sexier than my sweatpants and we'd eat takeaway sushi cross legged on the coffee table Japanese style Listen, there were plenty of nights I'd planned this kind of date night at home But I was not in the mood when the time came by the time I got the kids to bed I was like, oh my god, I don't feel like doing this But when I have something like that inked in the diary I just kept to the commitment kept to the plan and I never regretted it number four We made an honesty promise to each other early on.
Even if we'd rather tell a small lie, like about how that scratch on the car happened, for example, we always tell the truth. After 20 years of this, it's safe to say we trust each other implicitly. There are so many times I'm tempted to tell a small lie, but the no lying promise comes over me and I just can't do it.
And I think that's a good thing. Number five. We tell each other we love each other every day. And we hug, and we kiss, and we hold hands when we're walking down the street. We send each other silly or sexy texts. I read a book a few years ago, which talked about this concept of simmering and simmering is like just simple gestures that aren't meant to lead to sex, but they're intimate and kind of sexy.
Like I'll just run my fingers lightly along his forearm for both in the kitchen or he'll kiss the back of my neck when I'm doing something mundane or when we're out in public, it's just a little flirtatious glance or a graze against each other's body and instead of a quick kiss. Peck on the lips. When we say hi, when he gets home from work sometimes I'll pull him in closely for a gentle, but lingering kiss.
And I instigate the passionate kissing challenge about once a year when we need to kiss passionately once a day for a month. And then we always say, why don't we kiss like that more often? And the challenge helps us to remember how much we actually love kissing each other. Number six, When our sex life went through a literal dry patch after the birth of each of our kids, we made it a priority to get back on track again.
And I'm so glad we did. I wrote a whole blog post about this at myprojectme. com. If you go to the blog section, hit the love life area, it's called why you've lost your sex drive and how to get it back. And it's, it's how, how we did it. The crazy part is, Now, we are empty nesters, so we don't need to be quiet so the kids don't hear us.
We can do it anytime, we can do it anywhere, we could do it on the dining room table if we wanted to. And now, being mid to late fifties. Nature decides your procreation days are over and the libido slows down and it's absolutely not fair. It's like all those years of having to be quiet. Make sure the kids don't hear us like looking for those little opportunities.
And now literally we could do it anywhere, anytime. And the libido has slowed down. It's definitely not fair. But we still make the effort because it's still important to both of us. And I'm happy to say I still really honestly do fancy the pants off him. Number 7 We sleep entwined. He's my radiator on cold nights, and where the weather turns hot, we still keep a finger or a toe in contact.
Only once have I ever gone off to sleep in another room after an argument. We'll both stick it out, as far apart from each other as we can possibly manage without falling off the edge of the bed. Neither one of us gets any decent sleep when we've argued, so we know we have to make up the following day or we're going to risk a second sleepless night.
Number eight. Although we argue and bicker kind of a lot, there's no passive aggression in our relationship. And if something is bothering one of us, we say it. We openly communicate about any and everything, sometimes loudly and with passion. But having been in a passive aggressive relationship before, I'd rather have it out than in number nine.
Conflict resolution is important to us both. One of us will hold out the olive branch, make a kind of feeble apology, or lightly touch the other to signify a desire to return to normal. The other will kind of reluctantly accept. We do our best to stop things from escalating or dragging on as we both find it emotionally exhausting to not get along.
I've learned to recognize the role my ego plays in becoming defensive or wanting to win my point and I'm able to let it go more easily when I've been triggered. A few years back I set a recurring reminder to flash up on my phone that simply said tame your ego and I practiced ego awareness which really helped to cut back on the number of stupid arguments that never needed to happen.
I am now so much better at the art of letting go and I don't allow myself to get quite so irritated with his annoying behaviors and I accept that we all have annoying behaviors. Number 11. When we're having a real humdinger of an argument and neither one of us is backing down, we send an email. An email gives us the chance to articulate our feelings, put forward our side rationally without being interrupted.
Then the other can respond and it all gets resolved easier than when we let it escalate into a shouting match. I wrote a blog post, again, it's in the love section of myprojectme. com. It's called, um, how to end an argument with an email. And I actually wrote a, I did a podcast episode. It was episode 38.
It's called say it in a letter. And that is about this as well as a letter I wrote to my family, to my, my husband and my kids when I was feeling invisible. Yeah, that's episode 38 of this podcast. Number 12, we have different parenting styles and I used to worry that we weren't being more of a united front.
But one day he told me we were like yin and yang and our kids were getting a good balance from each of us and I was like, huh, maybe he's right. And now that they are amazing young adults and have a mixture of both of our qualities, I can finally feel assured that he was right. It's so interesting now to see that they reach out for him for practical matters and that kind of important support.
And to me for the emotional support, to talk through their feelings. And they really do get a great balance of support from each of us. So I think about the amount of time I spent worrying about our conflicting parenting styles. Yeah, yin yang parenting, that's what it's all about. Number 13. We share a lot of the same important ethics and values.
honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion. He's a really good guy. And he thinks I'm a really good person too. And we tell each other that. Number 14. We have fun, as in serious fun. We share a love of music, dancing, seeking out fun things to do. We have energetically attracted many super fun friends and we have a great social life.
Number 15. We balance our time spent socializing with friends with plenty of time. With just the two of us. We're best friends and we genuinely enjoy each other's company. He's very silly. He makes me laugh a lot. We just genuinely enjoy each other's company, which is a really cool thing. Number 16, health and fitness are important to us both.
We're far from fanatical about it, but we work out together regularly. We inspire, we motivate each other to stay in shape and to eat. Well, when one is feeling lazy, the other one is there like a personal coach to kickstart the other can get annoying sometimes, but it's really good. Like we really do like working out together and staying in shape and keeping each other healthy.
And I think that's great for the longterm health of our entire relationship. Number 17. Around the 10 year mark of our relationship, I noticed we were getting into some bad habits of just nitpicking, stupid criticism, snide comments, and I wrote an article for the Huffington Post about how we cut back on all that.
It's called, How to Treat Your Husband Like Your Best Friend. And I also put that on the blog on my, on my website. You can just Google it and it'll come up how to treat your husband like your best friend. It's also in my book. There's a chapter on that. Um, in my book, project me for busy mothers. Number 18, he's generous, faithful, and loyal.
He'd never let me down in a big way and I always feel secure and loved. He's respectful. He always lets me know where he is and if he's going to be home late. And I'm realizing I need to like hustle on this because he did send me a message right before I started recording this that said he's going to be home in like half an hour.
And that was about 10 minutes ago. So I need to keep moving here. Um, I don't want him to walk in in the middle of this. Um, number 19, he's my biggest supporter and he truly believes in me and me and him. He doesn't always understand what I'm doing, but he believes in me. and me and him. Number 20. We've made our marriage a top priority and our children have grown up with two loving parents who are as 100 percent committed to each other now as the day we exchanged our wedding vows.
So those were the original 20 that I wrote five years ago with some updated comments and now for my additional five reasons we've been happily married for 25 years now. Number 21. Well, now that we are official empty nesters, I'm happy to say that it suits us well. We're not pining for the boys. We absolutely love seeing them, but we enjoy each other's company so much that we truly are happy empty nesters.
We have prepared a lot for it. We saw how some parents put so much into being chauffeurs for the kids and being so involved in the kids lives and activities. And I can understand how that happens, like they need a lot of different things. But when the kids fly the nest, they realize they've got nothing to talk about or they don't know what to do together to fill that void.
And we don't have this problem for many of the reasons that I've previously outlined. We also made the 2020 plan when they were still young. I did a whole podcast about this called The Empty Nest, A New Chapter Begins. That was episode 13. We had a dream vision way back when of moving to Ibiza in 2020.
We calculated that that was going to be when our youngest graduated and would leave for university. And We ended up manifesting our dream house in Ibiza in 2020, right after the youngest, like the same day the youngest moved into his university accommodation. That whole episode number, episode number 13, if you want to hear the incredible story, is the power of the vision board and telling others about your dreams and your goals.
Number 22. Now that I understand that we are all energy, that everything is energy, I can see that we were an energetic match. That spark that we both felt when we saw each other across that crowded bar, it was energy. And because I have spent so much time in the last few years understanding myself as a vibrational being, um, uh, I'm able to protect my own energy better when his ego is flaring up from stresses at work, things that don't have anything to do with me.
And I'm not a psychic sponge. I'm not just soaking in his emotions so much anymore. I'm able to maintain my own vibrational frequency. I know how to create energetic boundaries. And as a result, I'm not very triggered anymore. I mean, I'm reading that stuff I wrote before about like our fights and, and these things and all the kind of, you know, um, uh, holding out the, the, all the branch, all this stuff.
I'm thinking, gosh, we don't really have to do that anymore. And I'm just realizing that understanding energy over the last few years, has made for a much more peaceful relationship, a more peaceful home environment. I teach all of this in my high vibe journey program now that I launched in 2020. Uh, so that's been really interesting for me to add on as my reason number 22.
Number 23. Now that I understand more about masculine and feminine energies and how it's great for both partners to have a balance of both, I can see that we do. I used to feel like a 1950s housewife for wanting to run a brush through my hair and greet him at the door when he got home from work. But after a full day of being in my masculine action mode, you know, doing, getting things ticked off my list, I instinctively knew that I needed to be more in my feminine with him.
When both of us are in our masculine energies, it doesn't really work. And the more I'm in my more gentle, feminine energy with him, it brings out his softer side, his more emotional side too. And again, it's that yin yang balance of energies that I think works well for both of us as a couple. Number 24.
Now that I am a soul plan practitioner, And I just literally finished my level two training today. I can look at both of our soul plan charts side by side and see that we are here in this lifetime to help each other, to grow and expand. We have so many of the same energies in our charts in different positions, which creates these different resonators.
And I can see that we're here to help one another, to fulfill our goals, to challenge each other in certain ways. And in this training, I also learned how to give family readings now. And when I put our boys charts up alongside ours, it's just incredible to see how we all have the same energies in different placements to help one another to expand, including to challenge one another.
When my new website is ready, I'll be taking bookings for family and relationship overlay readings. Well, I mean, I can do them now. So go ahead and email me hello at myprojectme. com in the meantime. It's incredible. Just say SoulPlan information and I'll send you the information because it's just nowhere on my current website.
Okay, number 25. Here we go. It's the last one. Luca is my rock angel. I took on his surname Pietrangeli, which literally means rock angels in Italian, and he has been my rock and my angel. A solid foundation like a rock with a loving magical quality like an angel. I always feel protected and looked after, guided, and deeply loved.
And I think he'd say the same thing about me. Happy silver 25th anniversary to my wonderful husband.
Unlike other episodes, I'm not going to ask my usual turnaround questions to get you to think about how my story relates to your own. I don't know what your relationship status is, and I'm mindful that you might not be in a happy relationship at the moment. I guess what I'd suggest you to do is to create a my dream vision of what you desire in a relationship.
Knowing that no one person can be everything to you, but you need to know what the non negotiables are and to know that self love is the most important love. In the words of RuPaul, if you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else? Can I get an amen? Thanks for listening to the Project Me Podcast.
Until next time, open your mind, open your heart, and stay curious. We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.