Posted on 04/13/2013 11:29:36 AM PDT by mylife
'My Foot is Too Big for the Glass Slipper': Gabby Reece unriddles the marriage fairy tale Gabrielle Reece and Karen Karbo TODAY books
April 12, 2013 at 7:57 AM ET
As a world-famous athlete and model, Gabrielle Reece already seemed to be on the fast track to having it all. When she met the man who would become her husband in 1995, it simply seemed like the next logical step. In "My Foot is Too Big for the Glass Slipper," however, Reece discloses that marriage was no simple feat. Here's an excerpt.
My childhood was rough enough to knock the belief in happily ever after clean out of my heart. My parents split when I was too young to remember; then, when I was five, my dad died in a plane crash. I’ve always been one of those hardheaded chicks who believe that we’re all responsible for our own happiness. Still, when I married Laird I was confident I’d found my soul mate. Who could be more perfect for me than a guy who was my height—six feet three—and was even more intense and focused than I was?
Gabby Reece: Women being submissive is 'a sign of strength' 'My Foot is Too Big for The Glass Slipper' Scribner
Laird and I met in 1995 while I was shooting a TV show called The Extremists. Like pretty much everything else these days, you can find it online. I was twenty-five and wore an oversized white T-shirt. My hair—are those bangs?—is whipping around in the wind.
“Today I’m hangin’ with an extremist who catches some serious waves,” I say. “His name is Laird Hamilton and he lives for the big swell.”
I ask him whether he considers this to be a big swell day, and even though it looks as if a hurricane is about to roll in at any second, he says no. Laird looked exactly the same way he looks right this minute: tan and focused. You can see us falling in love right there on camera. Ten days later we moved in together.
We didn’t even make it to our fifth anniversary before our sexy fairy tale turned into one of those unwatchable Swedish domestic dramas that makes the audience want to throw themselves off the nearest bridge. We were so simpatico in so many ways, but stupidly we’d counted on this fact to remain immutable and provide an unshakable foundation for our relationship. Our love was and is complex. We weren’t simply hot for each other, or companionable good friends, or a couple who had been together so long marriage was the obvious next step. We had it all covered; then, without knowing how it happened, we’d become two really tall near-strangers stomping around the house, fuming, slamming doors, and glaring at each other over our green smoothies.
Vote: What do you think about Gabby Reece’s ‘truly feminine’ quote?
How clueless was I about marriage, about living under the same roof with another human being with—surprise!—his own personality and his own life? Those who know my husband call him the Weatherman. I don’t put a lot of stock in astrology, but he is one of the world’s primo watermen and a Pisces—known for their deep sensitivity and mutable moods. Life with Laird: it’s windy, no wait, it’s raining, wait, wait, now it’s sunny.
The problem was not the moods—that’s who the guy is—but me. I took every slammed cupboard door personally. I thought, if he loved me, he’d be happy most of the time.
But I would never say anything, which became the problem that compounded the problem, a layer cake of misery. It’s never one thing that tanks the economy or ruins a marriage. I didn’t communicate, didn’t tell him when he was being a jackass, didn’t tell him how hurt my feelings were. I thought that when you love somebody you don’t make a fuss. As a professional athlete, one of the first things I’d learned was to suck it up, and that’s what I thought you did when the person with whom you were in a relationship was an ass. You sucked it up.
Gabby Reece: 'Self responsibility' is vital to marriage
I was becoming bitter and resentful. And if there’s one thing that trashes a love story, it’s resentment.
By Christmas of 2000 I was done. The marriage had broken down, and I didn’t feel like fixing it. So I filed for divorce.
For a while, Laird tried to talk me out of it, but then he let me go.
Then, in the spring, Laird passed through California, and arrived at the house in Malibu to pick up his snowboard. He’d completely disengaged from me. He was all business.
I saw clearly at that moment that he’d always been a generous, loving partner, and that his love had been a gift. He’d withdrawn it, and now I was just some chick who was holding on to his snowboard. It was then, after he’d fully stepped away, that I was able to look at him and see what I would be missing. For the first time I realized that he was a person with whom I had a good shot at happiness.
There are thousands of people out there with ideas about how to be happy and happily married and live the dream and own the happily ever after (which you already know I have no aptitude for, having messed up my marriage almost instantly).
Gabby Reece on marriage: Men communicate through food and sex
A lot of them are men without children, or loners, or people who have other people to do the tedious shit that drives everyone who has to do it—and who isn’t a complete Zen master—insane. Does Eckhart Tolle go to Costco every week for his family to make sure they have plenty of frozen three-berry mix for their smoothies and Pirate’s Booty for healthy snacking? Does Deepak Chopra spend most of his waking hours washing towels that his family dropped on the bathroom floor and then trampled with their muddy feet? Gandhi was out there starving by himself, changing the world for the better, but let’s not forget, Mrs. Gandhi was at home with the kids. What I’m saying is that it’s easy to be your best self when you don’t live in the world of “Clear your plate,” “Stop whining and go to bed,” “Did you brush your teeth?” “Honey, have you seen my clean shirt?” “Honey, what’s for dinner?” “Honey, we haven’t had sex in a month.”
I’m not beating up on these guys. They’ve offered a lot of wisdom, advice, solace, and inspiration to thousands, if not millions of people. They are not, however, married to a guy who doesn’t do email.
I am.
Laird and I got back together. For another year or two, we circled each other, unsure. We were like survivors of some natural disaster, grateful to be alive, but dazed by the wreckage. The foundation was cracked, the roof had leaks, the windows were smashed out. Repairs always take longer—and cost more—than you might first imagine.
As I write this, we’ve been married sixteen by-and-large happy years. In celebrity years, this translates to about nine million. It hasn’t been perfect. The degree to which it’s been imperfect would shock even those people who claim to thrive on imperfection.
In all those fairy tales, and also in a lot of Hollywood movies you wind up Netflixing, the story ends at the happily ever after. It’s pure bulls__t. Nothing makes you superficially more happy than the first flushes of love, but in the ever after it’s all about dealing with your lover, with understanding what makes him tick, surviving his crappy moods, and working together, always, to preserve what you’ve got and nurture a deeper, more profound and grounded love into the future.
Happily ever after means the good part of the tale has already been told. If we’re lucky, we’re married fifty or sixty years. Do you want to sign up for that? Half a century or more of no conflict, no drama, no restlessness, no opportunity to grow and change? You don’t want that, do you? Rather than happily ever after, we should aspire to game on—in part because that’s the reality and in part because it’s much more interesting.
Excerpted from My Foot is Too Big for The Glass Slipper © 2013 by Gabrielle Reece and Karen Karbo Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
video is at the link.
That’s a big ol’ tall girl.
Yeah, She’s competitive.
Yesterday my wife left for a business trip to Cologne. She had a sad face, telling our 3.5 year old daughter how much she was going to miss her. Our daughter replied: “You’ll manage” and walked back into the house.
I called my wife 15 minutes later, after she was gone, gave the phone to my daughter and told her to say: I love you.
Saw her last night on some TV show. They said she’d been taking quite a beating on the Internet for writing that she’d willingly taken on a traditional wife role in her marriage and saying that inside the family (but not in the rest of her life) she is submissive.
“You’ll manage”
lol.
So wrong.
She’s married to Laird Hamilton...very famous big wave surfer (perhaps the most famous).
I think I know: Feminism is all about manufacturing unhappy women with unrealistic views of the world. I would speculate that up until roughly 1960, most women were reasonably happy. Then they got liberated. They've been miserable, angry and resentful of men ever since.
When you reject the feminist vision of "having it all" you can be a lot happier. Sarah Palin comes to mind. If anyone has it all, it's her, and although she is a strong woman who calls herself a feminist, she certainly isn't that kind of feminist.
The Left sold women a bill of goods. And you can bet they knew what they were doing when they did it.
You’re a good Dad.
Yes but I’m still laughing.
I’ll never forget that one!
Thanks for posting this. I saw Gabrielle yesterday on The Today Show and was really impressed with her down-to earth attitude and her humility. Oh, and she is one lovely woman.
She sounds like a simpering teenager- he sounds like a male adolescent with his snowboard and cupboard slamming. Freakshow, celebrity freakshow
Re: Having it all.
In the modern feminist view, this means upper-class feminists can have everything the upper-class man traditionally had AND everything the traditional upper-class woman had.
Ignoring that the upper-class man could only get what he did because of a staff of wife, assistants and servants.
This whole controversy utterly ignores “the little people” necessary to allow either men or women to get as much as they do. Apparently nannies, secretaries and servants don’t have a right to their own lives, only to support the Master or Mistress in achieving their goals.
This whole controversy boils down to Victorian complaints about “the servant problem.” Only these folks think the government should pay for the servants.
Very well said.
I love to watch the big wave surfers, they’re amazing. To me, they’re one of the closest thing we have to the astronauts now that the space program and lunar landings by man have been stopped.
The government does pay for the servants. It pays the servants to sit at home and watch soap operas and game shows all day.
I mainly posted this because, in may modern relationships the woman seems to be in competition with the man.
Of course the result is always a train wreck.
Her point is that in order for a marriage to work and for a man be a man, the woman must be a woman.
A man will always fall short of a woman’s views, if she is in competition with him for the traditional male role.
Let the man be the man.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.