Four years ago on this day, I said I do to my husband, to be his lawfully wedded wife through thick and thin.
At that point, we had already been together for more than eight years. We had already experienced so much together; ups and downs, seasons of happiness and seasons of difficulty and the feeling of hopelessness. We found our faith and our church family in those years. We continued to push through everything we endured in order to grow closer together and make it to that wedding day.
On May 07, 2015, we got married.
We did many things over the year of our engagement to prepare for our marriage. Aside from the typical wedding planning and engagement pictures we also spent the year attending premarital counseling, joining and leading a couples group and attending relationship seminars at our church.
We prepared our hearts to make this commitment to each other in front of our friends and family. Symbolically, our wedding day marked the end of our separate lives and the beginning of OUR life. One of the biggest things we learned in our premarital counseling was that this would be the end of our individual lives and the beginning of our lives as ONE. There are three of us in this relationship, him and I and God. Not our families, not our friends, not our coworkers or even our Pastors… just us three. Everything else is secondary, on the periphery.
Even with all the preparations and planning no one truly know what their marriage will entail or what future awaits them. Our lives change so quickly sometimes slowly over weeks, months and years and sometimes quickly in an instant; you work towards a goal together or one of you is suddenly laid off or a family member suddenly passes.
No one can go in knowing exactly what to expect. Marriage, like everything else in life, cannot be taught or understood before it is lived. It needs to be felt and breathed. Sometimes it feels joyous, sometimes it hurts. There are good days and bad days and outside forces can creep in and take over.
If we look at social media all we tend to see are married couples who are still madly in love, who never fight, who never go through hard times and who manage to live a perfectly balanced and harmonious life.
“The key question is this: Will we approach marriage from a God-centered view or a man-centered view? In a man-centered view, we will maintain our marriage as long as our earthly comforts, desires, and expectations are met. In a God-centered view, we preserve our marriage because it brings glory to God and points a sinful world to a reconciling Creator.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?
I can tell you that on some days our marriage is less-than-perfect and it took me a long time to realize that it was never meant to be perfect. Today, I can’t help but think that perhaps the longest lasting marriages, the ones that last forever until death, look more like ours than those “perfect” ones on social media. Why?
Because we’re used to swimming through turbulent waters. We survived things that most people will never go through or may not have to face until they are much older. Despite those hardships and less-than-perfect days, we swim frantically and rise above the surface. We work to remember that neither of is perfect individually so we certainly won’t be as a whole. We remind ourselves to forgive and compromise and sacrifice. We learn and grow together and take each new day as it comes.
It’s certainly not the prettiest picture of marriage but perhaps the most realistic, the one that helps marriages last a lifetime.
So today, I know that marriage is not a fairytale all of the time, but we strive every single day to reach our happily ever after. And in the end, isn’t that, the greatest fairytale of all?
Four years ago today, I married my best friend. Despite it being a blustery, windy day, God blessed our wedding day with plenty of sunshine and a beautiful sunset.
I remember the happiness in his eyes, the bliss in the air, and the waves of emotions that I never knew I could feel in a single day.
On that day, I married the man of my dreams.
Four years later, is he still the man of my dreams? Yes and no.
He isn’t perfect, but I know he is perfect for me. He is perfect for me because he has seen me in my darkest moments and has never given up on me. He has seen me at my worst, yet held my hand again the next day. He supports my dreams and goals, even when he may not fully understand them.
“The truth is, we want to be known; we truly do. But we’re afraid. If you see the real me, will you run away? Am I even worth being known? Will the real me bore you? Scare you? Repulse you? And so we hide.”
― Gary L. Thomas, The Sacred Search: What If It’s Not about Who You Marry, But Why?
He makes me smile when I’m feeling down and manages to make me laugh out loud even as I’m mad.
And despite all the ups and downs of marriage, I know he loves me inside and out, for who I am, not for who I appear to be.
Our marriage has gone through seasons of hopelessness, countless ups and downs, and enough explosive fights to blow most people’s fights out of the water. We love hard and fight even harder. We fight hard to keep from losing each other in this reality called marriage. At times we feel hurt or betrayed by the stranger who seems to have replaced the other.
Over the years we have learned that love is not an emotion, it is a choice. It is a choice we make each and every day no matter how mad the other may have made us feel the day before. It is a choice we make on the good days and on the bad.
As Gary Thomas says in his book Sacred Marriage “A good marriage isn’t something you find; it’s something you make.”
We choose to make a good, Holy marriage every day despite the sudden storms. Sometimes it’s him, sometimes it’s me and sometimes it’s both of us. But one thing remains certain. Even though we may sometime forget it for the briefest of moments we now have a mutual understanding, a silent contract, a promise that binds our two souls. No matter how hard it seems, we don’t give up on each other.
Sometimes the storm is caused by an isolated incident, sometimes it’s the result of months of repressed emotions and words. Sometimes it’s caused by stress from work, by frustrations and doubt in our fertility journey, by one’s amplified emotions, or differences in our personalities and ways of thinking.
“Just when we are most eager to make ourselves understood, we must strive to understand. Just when we seek to air our grievances, we must labor to comprehend another’s hurt. Just when we want to point out the fallacies and abusive behavior of someone else, we must ruthlessly evaluate our own offensive attitudes and behaviors.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?
What we’ve had to learn is that living together, paying bills together, sharing chores together, growing up together– such realities of marriage bring out the best, and sometimes the worst in each of us.
Society tells us that we need to look out for our own wants and needs, we need to be selfish and not lose our sense of self. But, we know that marriage required us to give up everything that begins with MY and replace them with everything that begins with OUR. We must each learn to sacrifice. As I exited my life and entered our life, I learned about people, things and circumstances that matter more than myself.
How humbling, self-defeating, yet so beautiful and transcendental.
This is, what love after marriage looks like.
Standing in the same waiting area where 7 years prior I had sat anxiously waiting and praying while Nick was in surgery 
It felt so surreal to be back 7 years later. So thankful that we have not had reason to come back sooner and that this was only a visit, not a necessary stop
Completely unintentionally and due to unforeseen complications we ended up staying at the same hotel where we had stayed 8 or 9 years prior during Nick’s original tour of and testing at the Mayo Clinic 
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