A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage

By Gary Gallimore and Julie Gallimore

Join Gary and Julie on a transformative exploration of love and leadership, where they share their expertise in nurturing strong relationships. This dynamic duo offers a unique blend of compassion and insight, empowering couples to cultivate lasting connections filled with love and growth. Drawing from their own experiences of balancing successful leadership careers, a deep, meaningful love for each other, and the privilege of hearing the amazing stories of couples worldwide through their innovative business Leading and Love, Gary and Julie provide valuable wisdom on achieving happiness in marriage. Discover the beauty of diversity and the strength of unity as they inspire you to believe in the possibility of enduring love.
If you are new to marriage, this book will shed light on how to steer your marriage toward happiness. If you’re at your wits end with your marriage, you will learn how to reset your position and chart your relationship for new territory. If you are enjoying marital bliss, you will learn how to maintain the happiness you have uncovered. Spouses will continually grow and change and must continue to define what happiness means for each person and work to align their perspective on happiness. Commitment to this unending task helps to sustain and secure happiness in marriage.
Together with their four remarkable children, Gary and Julie are constantly reminded that it is possible to have a loving partnership, and a harmonious family life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: May 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891271586

Book preview

Introduction

Gary: I know it’s an introduction, and we want to let the audience know who we are. But since there is so much to cover, I think we can wrap up our story fairly quickly and get to the stuff that folks really want to hear. I don’t think we need to bore our readers with too many details.

Julie: I agree. How about you start?

Gary: Okay. Here is our story in a nutshell. We were both in university studying our butts off and working jobs to pay our cell phone bills and buy lunch. At the time, apart from studying, that’s all the responsibilities we had. Whatever money we made was ours to do as we wished. Eventually, we got married and had a child right away. We were insanely young. We look like teenagers in our wedding photos. We started with nothing. And we are proud to say that everything we have, we amassed together. We are both one hundred percent shareholders in all our assets and liabilities.

Julie: That’s it?

Gary: I thought that was a good summary.

Julie: It was definitely presented in a nutshell. You skipped a lot of important details. How about we add some more details to explain where we’re coming from and what was the impetus for writing this book?

Gary: Alright. Go ahead.

Julie: On our wedding day, I was already six months pregnant. In fact, I wanted the wedding day to be after exams and after what would be my last Christmas celebration with my family. There were a lot of people at our wedding, many of whom should not have been there. If it was up to me, it would have been a small and intimate gathering where I’m wearing a white jumpsuit with a maximum of forty people. My mother is the fourth of ten children, and my father is the first of eleven, so you can imagine the amount of family who would have been upset if we did things our way. And that’s just on my end. Gary’s family is quite big also. But it wasn’t up to me. Both of our parents got involved and their involvement ballooned the list to more than 300 invitees. A lot of things weren’t up to us. The consensus was that we were only getting married because I was pregnant. Yes, because we got married during the school break while I was six months pregnant. No, because we made the decision that this is how we were going to move on with our lives after I graduated from my first degree. Gary was in his last year, and I was in my first year, so he was going to start life and get things established for when I graduated. But being pregnant made things very different. Before we decided to get married, I had already decided that I would be a single mother for the foreseeable future. My fear of being left alone led me to prepare for being a single mother. Gary alleviated much of my anxiety when he emphasized that he wanted us to be a family. After the wedding reception—which ended pretty late; after all, it was a Friday night—we took off to a local hotel where we spent the rest of the weekend honeymooning.

Six days later we were back on campus attending lectures, completing assignments, and studying for midterms. It felt very different. I was a wife to a husband, and a child was on the way. Yikes! When our classmates asked how our break was, we replied, We got married! More were shocked and confused than excited.

We rented a basement from a family friend gracious enough to charge us what Gary’s part-time jobs could cover. He had two jobs on campus: hanging up posters for parties and overseeing the indoor track at the athletic facility. My part-time job paid for food, our cell phone bills, and everything else. It was a crazy hustle, running from school to work and work to home every single day. On weekends it was home and school, and by then, a lot of schoolwork piled up. I did this for the next three months.

As the baby inside me grew, I became more and more uncomfortable. Studying became more challenging. Staying attentive in class became impossible. I was either sleepy, hungry, or both. Luckily, Gary’s best friend, who had switched from track and field to bobsledding, was touring Europe, and he let us use his car for two months straight. We just had to fuel it and make sure the oil change was done on time. Unfortunately, the motor in the windshield wiper died, and it cost an arm and a leg to get it repaired. We got lucky again as our landlord allowed us to defer that month’s rent to a later time. Phew.

I was only in my second year of university and Gary was in his last year. The semester went well. My obstetrician put me on bed rest because our son was sitting on my spine. I reduced my course load to part-time so I would spend less time in the classroom, and I only had to submit one paper and sit two exams. I ended up deferring the two exams because our son made his appearance two weeks early.

Gary: After my very last lecture, I got a phone call that my wife was in labor. I was beside myself because I knew I’d be holding our child soon. I was also extremely nervous because I had no clue what the process would be like. The next day our son was born. He was calm and quiet. He only cried when he was hungry, needed a diaper change, or wanted to be held. This wasn’t so bad after all. A few days later, I returned to school to write my exams. I failed all but one. Thank goodness I didn’t fail any courses.

Julie: Gary eventually landed a job as an economics analyst, and I resumed school a year later after staying home to care for our son. I pivoted to pursuing a nursing career because there was a huge demand for nurses at the time. The day I found out I was accepted in the nursing program was the day I found out I was pregnant with our second child. Immediately after leaving the clinic where I learned I was pregnant, I received a phone call from admissions informing me that I was accepted into the program. The program was starting in two weeks. I called Gary and gave him the news about what our future would look like in the next few years.

I had completed all the prerequisites to gain acceptance into the nursing program. I sat in our car, stunned after just finding out from my doctor’s office that my nausea and continual headaches wasn’t a flu. I was pregnant with our second child. I remember being unhappy. Gary wasn’t. He expressed that he felt as though we were in control again. I didn’t feel I was in control. For him, our family was growing, and baby number two solidified us as a legit family, which contradicted the thoughts of many of the people who were at our wedding.

The nursing program was intense. My days were long and arduous. There was an assignment due every day, and missing a lecture felt as though I missed a week of school. Luckily, it was the day after my last exam that our second child decided it was time to enter the world. I returned to school eight months later to complete the program. So much was happening at an extremely high velocity. Taking a few minutes to catch my breath felt like I was abandoning all my responsibilities and commitments simultaneously.

I pushed through school, and after much proving and bargaining and negotiating, I eventually landed a job as a nurse in the hospital. I found out that the government sponsored recent graduates and convinced my practicum supervisor to hire me in her unit. My salary wouldn’t affect her budget, and I would continue to build my skill set. I was eventually hired into the unit. Six months later, I found out I was pregnant with our third child. At this point, we were gearing up to purchase our first home. Finally, things were a little bit more settled.

The years ahead were busy. It seemed like everything happened. Our priorities, our relationship, and our careers were all over the place. We couldn’t get things under control. Our marriage eventually hit rock bottom, and it was pretty ugly. There was so much pain and hurt and disappointment.

When we talk about what happened during those first eight years of our marriage, our stories do not match. It was all a blur. Everything happened so fast. Our circle—the people we thought cared about us—vanished into thin air. A few people stuck around, and to this day, we are still grateful to them. We were in a black hole trying to figure out what to do next. Should we go our separate ways and figure out how to raise three children? Should we stick it out? We went to therapy because we needed to fix our marriage. The therapist challenged us to completely move away from our now distant circle. When we did that, the circle turned against us, so we primarily surrounded ourselves with family.

More than five years later, I gave birth to our fourth child. We named him Jacob because we finally felt that we were in charge again. We replaced our dim past with a bright future. Gary always says to Jacob, Jacob, you complete our family, and every time you smile, you remind me of that. Jacob doesn’t understand, but he smiles every time he hears Gary say those words.

Gary: Well said. I guess I did leave out quite a bit of important facts and figures.

Preface

After almost two decades of marriage, raising children, and managing careers, we felt compelled to write this book. Not just from our experience but from the experience of the many couples we’ve coached. Couples we learned from that gave us a broader understanding of marriage. Since we launched Leading and Love, we have had the privilege of hearing the amazing stories of many couples worldwide. While a lot of their experiences cross on certain areas, they are very different and quite unique. Sometimes we are blown away at what we hear. The struggle is very real, and for some couples, all they have is struggle, and they do not envision any way out of it apart from splitting up.

We coached one particular couple for several weeks. At some point in their relationship, they separated, and they later decided that divorce was the best option. However, they were both unsure of what the path of divorce would entail. Tanya (not her real name) reached out to us looking for help to save their marriage.

Both spouses lived on the west coast, in the same state, but not only were they living in separate homes, they lived in separate cities. Once our sessions got underway, they never missed a meeting. They never canceled. They never rescheduled. They were always right on time for our sessions. They both actively participated. They shared. They took ownership of their faults. They each admitted where each went wrong and acknowledged where each could have done better. They complimented each other. They joked with each other. It was amazing to see.

They had one child between them, and they worked long hours to keep themselves occupied. Kurt (not his real name), a physiotherapist, focused on athlete development while Tanya worked in a healthcare institution. During the sessions, each spouse laid out their concerns on the table, and as the sessions progressed, they seemed to be doing much better. They were taking trips together; they deprioritized work many times so they could be together; they were in better communication, and they even planned to move back in together. One day, a few hours before our session was supposed to start, we got a call from Tanya saying that they decided to go ahead with the divorce. We were stunned.

We were stunned because we genuinely thought that their marriage was going to recover. We regrouped, checked our notes, recalled the conversations, and soon realized that we weren’t really surprised; we were just disappointed that it didn’t work out for them. We had to fight off the thoughts that we failed to help them.

From our experience, couples who enter therapy usually do so with a particular outcome in mind. They already know what they want. Sometimes they want the same thing, and sometimes they want different things. Some spouses go to therapy to prove that the other person is an unfit partner. Some couples go to therapy to salvage their relationship and get a brand-new start. What we noticed was that couples always got the result they wanted.

As we sifted through our notes from our coaching sessions and took stock of our own marriage, several themes popped up about what constitutes a happy marriage. These themes are what this book covers—some guidelines on how to be happy in your marriage.

We are not talking about successful marriages. Success doesn’t necessarily mean happiness. A successful marriage can be one that lasts several decades. A successful marriage can be one where an affair never took place. A successful marriage can be one where children are raised to be well-behaved and high-achieving students. A successful marriage can be one where both spouses were rock stars in parenting and in their careers.

Clearly, a successful marriage doesn’t always mean it’s easy. While a happy marriage is different, it contains some of the elements that equate to success. Therefore, a happy marriage is not easy either. A couple can see their marriage as successful but not happy. A few of the more senior couples we’ve spoken to interpret their children being in strong marriages as the badge of success in their own marriages. They stayed together to raise their children. When asked if they were in fact happy in their own marriage, there were mixed responses.

Sonia put it this way: We raised our children in a Christian home. Even though we weren’t strict from a religious standpoint, we see that our children are teaching our grandchildren the same values we taught them. That signals to us that we did things right. Now that our children have long fledged the nest, we are more adamant about contributing to each other’s happiness. It’s an adventure I wish we had had earlier. We are much older now, and there is only so much we can do and so many places we can go. But we plan to do as much as possible to contribute to each other’s happiness.

Before we (Julie and I) launched Leading and Love, we analyzed a cross section of our marriage. We were quite disappointed about what we discovered about our own relationship. We were extremely busy in our careers, raising our family, and our community involvement. We realized that more than 35% of our time was dedicated to things that did not benefit