I Spent My First Year of Marriage Sniffing My Husband's Surgical Stitches With My Mother-In-Law. Here Is What It Taught Me About Love.

It is a Tuesday morning. I am crouched over my husband's crotch, reading glasses on, my mother-in-law leaning over my shoulder for a better look. I am sniffing his surgical wound to check for infection. She is comparing today's photographs to yesterday's with the focused attention of someone at a wine tasting.

I am 31. This is my first year of marriage.

This episode is everything that year was — and everything it taught me about what a relationship is actually made of when you strip away everything most people assume it requires.

Less than a year after our wedding, my husband Joel had a urethroplasty — a complex, multi-stage reconstructive surgery on his urethra that he had been facing his entire adult life. What followed was twelve months of suprapubic catheters, urine bags, a camera roll that would deeply confuse anyone who borrowed my phone, medical terminology I never asked to learn, and zero sex in the traditional sense.

It was also the year our marriage became unshakeable.

In this episode I tell you the full story — the decade Joel and I spent not being together before we figured out the obvious, the ayahuasca vision I had at 22 that I completely misread, the thirty-five pages I wrote about the partner I wanted without realising I was describing him, and what California in 2023 finally forced us to admit.

I also share what a year like this actually teaches you. About what relationships run on when chemistry is off the table. About what teamwork looks like when it is ninety-ten and not fifty-fifty. About why judging your relationship on the easy seasons is the single most useless metric available. And about why the nervous system foundation you build before the hard seasons arrive is what determines whether you make it through them together.

This is the most personal episode I have made. It is also, I think, the most useful.

• The full story of our first year — the surgery, the catheter, the camera roll, the mother-in-law wine tasting situation, and the flip-flow drainage valve I now recommend without hesitation
• The decade before we got together — the Tinder height lie, the ayahuasca vision, the thirty-five pages, the car park phone call, California 2023
• Why every study on relationship deterioration is measuring the wrong variable — and what connection without sex actually requires
• Four things a genuinely hard first year teaches you that an easy one never could
• Why real teamwork is not fifty-fifty — and what the willingness to carry ninety actually looks like in practice
• The nightly practice that replaced physical intimacy as our primary connection ritual — and why it has been more valuable than we expected
• The nervous system piece: why the foundation you build before the hard season is what carries you through it
• What co-regulation in a long-term relationship actually looks like — and why a regulated nervous system is the most durable thing two people can build together
• Why who you choose to share your life with contributes to roughly ninety percent of your happiness

"Remove the vehicle and you find out very quickly whether the connection was ever really there — or whether it was two people having a good time and calling it love."

If this episode landed — whether you are in a relationship being tested right now, navigating a season that is asking more of you than you planned for, or you simply want to build the kind of regulated nervous system that holds when life gets genuinely hard:

1:1 Coaching — personalised, structured support built entirely around your specific nervous system pattern. I work with a small number of women each month.

Book a free discovery call here

Website: https://www.theexhalecollective.coInstagram: @lovisaaengstrand

Keywords

first year of marriage honest, marriage without sex, urethroplasty partner support, chronic illness relationship, nervous system and relationships, co-regulation couples, connection without physical intimacy, what makes a marriage