A house of cards

As their lives got busier, Laila was starting to see less and less of her husband. Despite her running her company from their own home, there would still be weeks where she would only see him for a few minutes before bed and that was only because she forced herself to stay awake until he came home. Like that, any plans of starting a family was silently put on hold as the focus was shifted to their careers. Being left alone in that large house, with only the staff and the walls to talk to, they started to grow distant. Though they continued to sleep in the same bed in order to not cause any suspicion to their parents, they might as well have been sleeping in separate rooms. He would stay at the office till late everyday. Including the weekends. Sometimes he would join her for dinner when their friends or parents had come to visit, but mostly he would only come home when he thought she was asleep. He would sneak into bed and by the time she would wake up in the morning, he would already be gone.

With neither of them willing to take that first step of fixing their problems or admitting their fault in the situation, this situation continued for a long time. During which their relationship turned shallow. What was once a happy marriage, had now turned into a shell of one. An image to the outside world, while nothing had remained on the inside. To the outside world, she kept smiling and making excuses. Throwing the blame on them both being too busy, while knowing that there was more to it than that on the inside. As the situation continued on, she began spending more time away from home. Staying over at a friends house, her parents or her in-laws. Changing it up in order to not cause suspicion. Their silent warfare continued for almost a full year. That was when they were forced to break the silence and give things another go after both of their parents got involved.

The front Laila and David had put on to the outside world had almost been flawless but apparently they couldn't hide it from the people who had raised them. The parents on both sides had noticed something was off. Though they loved their children, them visiting so often and without each other, had not gone unnoticed. Thinking it might just be a lovers spat, they stayed out of it in order for them to solve their issues on their own. But when the situation didn't improve over time and even started getting worse, they could no longer ignore it. Fearing that they would get divorced if the situation lasted any longer, they decided to step in. The parents collaborated in their plan to get their children to talk again. They decided to invite them over to Laila's parents' house for dinner, not informing them of the other one being invited as well. When they arrived, they set Laila and her husband down for a heavy talk.

Though their conversation started out a bit reluctantly, she and Jake too realized that they couldn't continue things the way they were. They talked for two hours that evening, discussing their struggles and their wishes. After everything was out in the open, both of them apologized and agreed to try and work on their marriage. Not only did they agree to free up more time for each other, they also decided to go to marriage counselling in order to learn to communicate with each other once more. This was over three years ago and it managed to return peace to their home ever since. From that moment on things had been great. Even better than before. Or at least she thought they were... But last night had her questioning whether her husband thought the same. Yesterday's discovery had Laila wondering whether she might have even been fooling herself with the image she had in her mind. Had she really thought things were better than before during these last few years or did she simply desperately want to believe that was the case in order to be able to stay in her fairy tale a bit longer?

The more she thought about it, the more this became an actual possibility. While she had thought she had been content with their 'new' and reformed relationship over the years, maybe this had been the pink glasses talking. This new relationship was built from the shattered fragments of what their marriage once was and the fragments had been glued together by a lot of effort and the desire to make things work. But the question is if you can really go back once something is broken? No matter how well you glue something back together, the cracks will always remain. Even if they aren't always visible to the naked eye, the cracks are there and they make it all the more fragile. So, once either or both of them stop putting in the work or the trust is damaged, this relationship was bound to come falling down like a house of cards. With the blow from last night, the ground underneath their house of cards has started shaking and for Laila it feels like she can see the first cards tumbling down.

While she had honoured the promise they had made three years ago, right now she wondered if she had blinded herself in the process. She asked herself if her desire to make it work had caused her to not see that maybe Jake had stopped feeling the same way? Maybe she had changed as well from the her before their cold war. Maybe her feelings couldn't go back to what they were before the problems had entered their marriage. Maybe they hadn't been right for each other to begin with...