Love comes easy to peo­ple when times are easy. I mean look at the Bach­e­lor. Every­one is in love on that show. But when times are hard, that’s the real test of love. And that’s prob­a­bly why the cou­ples on the Bach­e­lor rarely last after the show. This test deter­mines the strength of your rela­tion­ship and the strength of your love for each other. How will your rela­tion­ship fare when the days aren’t as bright and pretty? How will your rela­tion­ship fare when you have tri­als work­ing to pull you apart?

Bear and I expe­ri­enced a small trial in our rela­tion­ship. Since the end of June, we have been look­ing for a car. We weren’t look­ing for the per­fect car but just a car. A car to get him back and forth to work with­out break­ing down along the way. Every spare minute together was spent dri­ving back and forth to deal­er­ships and car lots.
In the begin­ning, we drove there with hope and joy about the search for a car. The ride home was replaced with dis­ap­point­ment and anger. Toward the end of the process, we learned to keep our hope tucked away. Instead of hope, we were full of skep­ti­cism and doubt any time we ven­tured out.

The con­stant dis­ap­point­ment started to weight on us. Bear is a usu­ally jovial per­son but there were times when he would just sit qui­etly to him­self. I could see that his mind was off some­where. The strug­gle of find­ing a car was eat­ing at him.

I was fight­ing my own frus­tra­tion. I have so much on my plate, and I was beyond upset with all the time we wasted search­ing for a car. I took a day off from work. I put all my plans on hold so that I could help him. I put this blog on hold. I started to miss our care­free days spent loung­ing on the couch or trav­el­ing into the city. It hurt me that I couldn’t do more for him.

Things around the house were somber. We had moments of laugh­ter but the men­tal and phys­i­cal stress of car hunt­ing was mak­ing it hard to be happy.

One day in the mid­dle of deep thought, I real­ized that not once dur­ing this strug­gle had we turned on each other. Not once did we fight with each other about the sit­u­a­tion. And there were times when I could’ve been a bitch about it. There were times when I could’ve made it dif­fi­cult for him. There were times when he could’ve turned his frus­tra­tion into anger against me. But instead, we worked together.

I men­tioned this to him and of course, he shrugged it off. He saw it as no great feat but I am proud of us. No one wishes bad on them­selves but I am happy that our rela­tion­ship went through this test unscathed. It makes me feel con­fi­dent that down the rode, when trou­ble strikes again, we’ll stand strong.