Hey there, Jen here, and this is a happy bit. I'm talking today about how I survived my

kind of crappy marriage without losing myself. So I'll kind of give you a chronology and some

explanations. Well, my husband and I are both very type A. We both have PhDs. I guess you could

kind of say we're both CEOs.

Well, when you bring two CEOs or two alphas together, what happens?

You both have a little bit of conflict about who's in charge.

So from the beginning, that's exactly what happened.

But I want to fast forward and let you know all as well.

We're still together.

And I had to learn a lot of

things to make that happen. But I will say one thing. For us, marriage was like putting two

jagged stones together in a tumbler and letting us chip off each other's rough edges. Our marriage

has probably been one of the best things for both of us. We've both learned in amazing ways and

become way

better people because we are each strong enough to help each other do that. If either one of us

had married someone weak or obliging, we wouldn't have learned so much. So I am grateful for my

marriage. But backing up, there were so many times the big D word was used, divorce. I felt like he didn't

listen. He felt like I was bossy and we had this ridiculous pattern of conflict that we went through

again and again and again so much so that we knew the phrases each of us would use with each other.

We can almost predict

word for word what someone would say. And sometimes we'd actually do that, which would escalate the

conflicts even further. One thing that makes me really sad about all of that conflict was that our

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