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Twelve years ago today I married my favorite person on earth. And it was the smartest decision I have ever made. I freely admit that marriage takes work. But it is the best work that I know. Thanks babe for 12 amazing years!!
If you are married how long have you been married?
Back during the Oscars Ben Affleck gave a lovely speech praising his wife and acknowledging that they have worked on their marriage.
Immediately there was controversy. People were upset claiming that marriage shouldn’t take work or be difficult. And if it is you shouldn’t be married.
I don’t know why this surprised me. This is why marriages end 50% of the time. Because when it becomes work a lot of people bail. (I realize this oversimplifies things and I don’t want to be callous towards anyone who has gone through a divorce. But I think even people who fought for the survival of their marriage and lost can acknowledge that many barely put up a fight.)
If we are married and we don’t acknowledge the realities of marriage we are doing others who are married and unmarried a disservice.
It is one of the reasons Ryan and I are passionate about our marriage ministry. We try and teach from a place of realness and transparency. And it is why we bring in other couples to help teach who will do the same. It is why posts like these from Mary and Lisa and Casey are so important.
I get the difficulty of laying private stuff out for public consumption. And I am not sure I would ever advocate sharing your marriage troubles with the world while you are going through them.
But when you are on the other side of them. When you have fought to stay together and won. When you can stand up in a better place and say, “Stay. It is so worth it on the other side.” Can I beg you then to tell your story?
Our airbrushed, Pinterest ready lives are really lovely and all, but they are rarely reality. And they can just be one. more. thing. that defeats a person hanging on by their fingernails. I think most of us are craving a little more “real” in our lives, from our social media world and from our friends.
So I’ll be the first to boldly proclaim as a happily married woman. Marriage is hard work. Often times, along with parenting, it is the best possible hard work. But it is not natural to forgive and be selfless and sacrifice and pick up the 300th sock that instead of being inside the basket, lies just next to the basket (seriously. almost 13 years in. Seriously).
And I bet those way further down the road of marriage would say it still isn’t easy. That it never really gets to the point where you coast in to the finish line. But if you are willing to keep loving and forgiving and sacrificing, it is worth it. So keep working.
So you know if you have read this blog for any amount of time that I believe strongly in marriage. And I believe one of the worst things you can do in your marriage is talk badly about your spouse in front of other people. Most CERTAINLY you shouldn’t talk badly about your spouse on Facebook, Twitter or for heaven’s sake a blog!!
However……..
Am I the only one married to a…. how should I say it….. “searching challenged” spouse?
Let me explain. There are many mornings where Ryan is leaving for work running around looking for his keys, watch, wallet, etc. and I tell him to look in a place I last say that particular thing. He goes, he looks, he comes back and says “it isn’t there”. I go, I look, I come back with the keys, watch, wallet that he JUST looked for.
Tonight my mom called and said she was missing her robe and slippers and had she left them at our house (I was out of town with Coke in Atlanta and she stayed here to help out- more on that next week). I was coming home from visiting my new nephew in the hospital (more on that next week) and called home to ask Ryan to look in the car to see if she had left them there.
He went, he looked and reported that they weren’t in the car. When I got home I went in the car, looked in the same spot and there a bag sat with my mom’s robe and slippers. I literally started laughing and asked Ryan how he possibly missed them. He said, “you told me to look for a robe and slippers, not a bag.”
FACE PALM!!
Oh babe. Thankfully there are a million other things you do right. And thankfully you married such a rock star wife who keeps all your ducks in a row (still waiting on that humility thing……).
If you have been married awhile and added a couple kids to the mix you know how hard you have to work at keeping the romance alive. Oddly enough poopy diapers, stacks of unwashed dishes and leg hairs that have been sorely neglected during quick showers while the kids tear down the house outside don’t really set the mood.
So when the stars align, the mood strikes and the kids are actually asleep you should take advantage.
The hubby and I found such a moment last night but something unfortunate happened as we began to kiss. There is no great way to dance around the subject. Ryan’s breath just stank. Stink. Stank. Stunk.
And since I am clearly not so great at dancing around the subject I told him so. Well I was kind of polite about it!! But I may have told him his breath smelled like hot dogs. He protested that he had just brushed his teeth and as far as he could recall, had not had any hotdogs in the recent past. Not wanting to risk the moment passing he went off to brush again.
But after he left I realized the smell was still strong. It was like one of those smells that gets trapped in your nose and won’t leave. I may or may not have expressed loudly that this was the case as my hubby brushed his teeth in the next room.
Until he came back in, took a big whiff and noted that we clearly had a skunk right outside our window. Whoops. My bad.
People seem to be in two camps for Valentine’s Day – dreading it, or looking forward to it immensely. Well, there may be the third option of complete indifference (which is really only a problem if you happen to be married to a “looking forward to it immensely” person, but let’s ignore them for a second).
Whether you dread it or look forward to it, Valentine’s Day always poses the same risk. It suffers from “New Years Eve Syndrome.” Do you know what we mean? No matter what is planned, the night never lives up to the huge expectations that people put on it. Dinner, chocolates, wine, flowers, sex… all are great things, but even combined, Valentine’s Day rarely lives up to its implied billing as “the most romantic day of the year.” So let’s change that billing.
Read the rest over at For Better and Worse……
Are you reading the new marriage blog? Cause I would really love it if you were reading over there as well. I love The Diaper Diaries and my readers but you know how when you have a new baby you just want everyone to ooh and aah over it? Yeah. That.
The hubby has written a great post today and there is so much good stuff over there. Will you all just indulge me and head over there. Maybe even subscribe……
Since it tis the season to give gifts I thought I would share with you the best gift you can ever give your children. Hint: You can’t get it at a store.
When I married my husband, I must admit, I was anxious to add to our family. I have always been a “kid” person and had wanted to be a mom for as long as I can remember. My husband, on the other hand, had never really spent a ton of time around kids; and although he wanted kids, wasn’t in as much of a hurry.
Looking back I am so grateful for the two years we were married before we had our daughter. I have so many wonderful memories of the time when our family was just the two of us. And I think it set a strong foundation for our marriage.
I distinctly remember the feelings I had after Lily was born — my heart hadn’t just stretched to make room for HER, but I also loved my husband more deeply than before. Watching him embrace fatherhood and fall in love with his daughter brought out intense feelings in me.
But it’s amazing how time goes on, the dishes piled up, we got low on sleep, had more kids, more responsibilities, more commitments, and those intense feelings began to fade.
And if I am completely honest, those kids can steal bigger and bigger pieces of my heart.
Read the rest of my guest post at Simple Organized Living
It seems as though no matter what you try it is really hard to avoid stress during the holidays. And while the holidays are a time to celebrate with family, sometimes our families can be the cause of that stress. A while back Ryan and I did a little segment on the local news about navigating holidays in your marriage. It seems like the perfect time to post it.
*you may need to click through to watch the video if you are viewing this on email or RSS feed.
As we all recover from the annual weekend of overeating, here is a little
We all know from our childhood Sunday school lessons that God’s creation was once perfect, but is now imperfect. Over the course of the last ten years, I’ve seen this truth realized in my body. It’s not that God didn’t knit me together perfectly in the womb as he tells us in Psalm 139, but as it turns out he made me a good foot too short… for my weight, that is. I’m pretty sure that if I were somewhere in the 6’8 range, my body mass index would be right on the money. But since I’ll remain vertically-challenged in this life, I’ve come to the realization that I may need to drop a few LB’s if I’m going to live my life to the fullest.
Like a lot of guys, I’ve been steadily putting on the pounds since marriage, and have been insecure about it. Thankfully, Jill has managed to acknowledge that I’ve gained some weight without making me feel terrible about it. And so despite the downward slide, I’ve remained optimistic that I’ll get motivated and get me one of those Bradley Cooper physiques that sell so many issues of People magazine to you ladies.
Thankfully, about two months ago, Jill’s dad asked me if I’d like to try a home workout with him. Well, not just any workout – P90X – the “mother of all home workouts.” I liked the idea of us doing it together and despite the fact that he’s in his sixties, does Pilates twice a week, and just ran a half marathon, I figured I could keep up with him.
Long story short, we hit the 30 day mark of the 90 day series and things are going very well. I’ve dropped an inch off of my waist, am building muscle, and most importantly, I’m having a lot of fun doing it. As I think of the last month, I’m very, very thankful for the encouragement that I’ve gotten from him, from Jill, and from my parents, my mother-in-law, and even my kids. The key here is that they’ve been encouraging, but not TOO encouraging if you know what I mean. They haven’t been over the top with compliments (code for “we can’t believe you have hauled that beer gut out of bed each morning to do this”) but have instead expressed sincere encouragement every so often.
The lesson for me is that Jill would have been well within her rights as my wife to say, “I’d prefer that you not turn into a monster slob one fried chicken at a time… can you please get to the gym?” but instead she was patient with me and provided encouragement. Moreover, my father in law is a gym rat and certainly didn’t need to do P90X with me, but he jumped in with me because he knew I wouldn’t likely do it myself.
I’ve come to believe that while encouragement may abundant in this world for Generation Y with their helicopter parents (us), it is sorely lacking in this world for most adults. And a little goes a looong way. And while I may not be able to restore my physique to anything near perfection, whatever improvements I make I can chalk up to having loved ones that value encouragement more than criticism.
How can you encourage your spouse this week?
Tonight in households across America the same argument is occurring. It looks a little something like this.
“How was your day?”
“Kind of rough. Work is really challenging right now and my day was filled with meetings.”
“Well that wasn’t anything. I had kids clinging to me all day and picked up the same mess over and over.”
“I hear you, but my boss is really being demanding right now and I am so exhausted from such a long day.”
“YOU’RE Tired? Try cooking and cleaning all day and dealing with bickering kids!!”
You know what the problem is when we try to one up our spouse in the “who had a harder day battle”? Nobody wins.
A few years back Ryan was traveling a bunch for work and I was miserable trying to parent without him home. He would call from these really nice hotel rooms after a dinner on an expense account and say how much he missed us. I would be seething thinking about how nice it would be to sleep in a bedroom someone else cleaned, eating yummy food and sleeping through the night without babies waking me up.
But then I traveled alone a few times. That hotel room all to myself got lonely, the food didn’t taste near as good sitting at a table by myself and I missed my family terribly. Lather, rinse and repeat for several months and I would have gotten a tiny taste of my husband’s life.
And it only took a few days of me being away for Ryan to get a taste of what life is like at home all day with three kids. Actually it probably only took about ten minutes.
When I have a rotten day I want to feel supported. And when my husband has a bad day he wants the same. Neither of us want to enter into a competition about who has it worse. So next time your husband opens up the lines of communication about the struggles in his life, listen. Yeah, I know. Your day was harder. But just listen.
