30 Things...Describe Your Relationship With Your Spouse

Dear girls:

Before writing my own thoughts on my relationship with your dad, here's a couple of quotes I've heard on marriage that have stuck with me over the years. (I'm not sure of the sources).

-"Don't marry a man unless you'd be proud to have a son exactly like him."

-"Maybe marriage isn't meant to make you happy, maybe marriage is meant to make you holy."

-"Don't talk badly about your husband to anyone, ever."

I could literally write a novel about my relationship with your dad, so this will be the very short version. Maybe one day I'll go into more details about how we met and that sort of thing, but for now, I'll say this.
When your dad and I met, we liked each other almost right away. We fell in love pretty fast, and from the time we started dating to awhile into our marriage, it seemed like it was the most in love we would ever be. I didn't care what we did as long as we were together, and we really did enjoy being together. Since my teenage years, people had told me that marriage was hard, and  I believed them, but at the time it seemed like our relationship couldn't be any better, that nothing could go wrong...and that we would always be that way.

I was wrong in all of those things.

Girls, we hit rocky places. People were right, marriage got hard some days. 
I've thought about it lots over the years, and this is the conclusion I've come to. When you marry someone, you are committing to spend the REST of your life with them. That's a HUGE commitment, bigger than any of us realize when we make it. It means spending every day with that one person, knowing everything about them (even the irritating things!). It means making decisions about EVERYTHING in life with that person...or being hurt when one of you makes a decision without the other, depending on the situation. It means coming to compromises over almost everything in life, from how to raise and discipline your children, to what things are your responsibilities in your home.
It's a big commitment, and no matter how much you love that person, you won't get along every day for the rest of your life. 

But, I feel that it would be that way with anyone....your best friend even. If you spend every day with someone, eventually you will butt heads over something. 
In the earlier days of our marriage, there were days when we would both think, "we can't even find an activity that we enjoy doing together...why did we think we had things in common when we got married?" 

It has taken lots of time, and tremendous effort on both our parts. Over the years we have both learned hard lessons in patience, forgiveness, compromise, and unconditional love. Oh, and in laying down our pride (that's a doozy!)

So, to answer the original question. I wouldn't trade our relationship right now for anything. Remember when I said that I used to think it couldn't get any better than it was? It did...in ways I couldn't imagine.

 Through those lessons I mentioned above, we have come to a "sweet spot" in recent years. We have found more and more things that we enjoy to do together, and he is truly one of my favourite people to spend time with (other than you guys :)). 

We have discovered that we have a very similar sense of humour, and we laugh a lot together. When I was young I dreamed of having a husband I could laugh with, and it is awesome. We are so much more comfortable with each other, and we just have more fun!

We have come to appreciate each other more I think. At the beginning of our marriage, we were just discovering everything about each other...and some of those things we didn't like very much. Now we know each other REALLY well (I freak him out sometimes by telling him what he is thinking :)), and I think we just tend to focus more on the things that we love about each other. We also make an effort to do less of the things that we know annoys the other.

I know this post was supposed to be a description of our relationship, and not a list of marriage advice. I hope I've stuck to that for the most part...but as you girls grow up, my hope is that the marriage advice that I don't TELL you, you'll SEE in our marriage. In my opinion, you have the best dad in the world to show you how a woman should be treated. He is wise, fair, cool and collected, and a great leader. My prayer is that you won't settle for less :)