My Life Right Now - Marriage

I’ve been married over a year and a half. On one hand, I guess we still qualify as newlyweds, and sometimes I think,” Wow…I’m a wife!” On the other hand, it feels like we’ve always been married. It’s weird to think there was a time in my life when we weren’t together, when I didn’t even know Mark, when all my pining over silly boys was a big fat waste of time. But I know that was the time when God was preparing me for my future husband.

In July 2008 we had been married for a few weeks, and I came down with a mild case of the “honeymoon-is-over-blues.” I had spent nine exciting months planning a wedding, coordinating every detail and enjoying every moment leading up to the most fabulous celebration of my life. Then the wedding day came, and it was all a blur. It was over. Just like that. Some weeks later we went to another wedding, and as I looked at the beautiful bride, in my head I was pouting, “It’s not about me anymore…” And though I already knew it, the truth didn’t hit me until a little later, “DUH!” – it was never about me. It was about US starting our lives together as husband and wife. It’s so easy to get caught up in the excitement of the wedding and ignore the obviously most important piece, the marriage. The wedding lasted only a few hours, but we have an entire lifetime of excitement ahead of us.

I'm not going to say we have the perfect marriage - who does? We do things that drive each other crazy - I forget to turn off the lights when I leave a room, and Mark keeps all his clothes in piles on the floor - but we learn to live with it. We argue a lot more than we ever did when we were dating, but somehow we always wind up laughing at the end of it. We discover that our selfishness become more apparent in marriage, but we pray that God will give us the grace to consider the other. The challenges of marriage (which I’ll save for another post) are very real. But I love my husband, I love being married, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.