My marriage is a 5th grader?!
Y’all, I am still confused about time. It’s so slow on those hard days, and yet here I am a decade into my marriage. That is a third of my life!
Anywho! I thought I’d process a bit here and share some things I’ve learned since 2008.
First let me say I was SO naïve!!! I thought marriage was just a giant version of dating with lots more compromise involved… I mean I got the compromising part right! Along those same lines, while I was very young and I don’t how I will handle Dominick if he takes a similar path, I have to say I am so thankful God brought us together when he did. I listened to someone explain the topic of the “best” age to marry like this: “Marriage is hard and beautiful. Either you’re young- and you have to grow up together and build a life together and that is hard and beautiful. Or you are older- and you have to merge two independent lives together and that is hard and beautiful.” So really either way it is hard work, but it is beautiful work.
So really I am in awe of how much I have learned AND how much I’ve realized I still have to learn. There are so many things I think we can do better, and yet as we have talked about this milestone with our people I realized I can give us some credit.
We have picked up a few gold stars along the way and maybe even an award or two! I hope God grants us more lessons, learned a little easier, over the next decade.
Disclaimer – we are not perfect, and still need Jesus everyday in our marriage. It is a daily choice to be a team. The lessons we have learned below do not mean we do it perfectly. They are just things we do better and get right more often than not.
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
- We fight so much smarter now. – I used to get so anxious, every fight seemed one wrong word away from disaster (not divorce, just emotionally cliff-like). It took years to see how my previous relationships had affected my threat assessment function. Now it’s more likely just arguing. Nothing is so important personally that we put it before each other.
- We LISTEN when it really counts. – Derek and I are not robots with perfect recall. But we continue to work toward really giving each other attention when emotions are running high. Since we are fighting smarter we can tell when something is a capital B big deal and we pay attention to that.
- We know ourselves better AND we know how to communicate that knowledge to each other. – Derek has always been blunt and very direct, but I am way harder to pin down on just about every topic. So we are coming from different perspectives all the time. One of the best things for me is taking insights from personal reflection and personality research to better understand why I do the things I do. One of my favorites is the Enneagram. You can learn more here, but really quick there are two reason I love this. One- it focuses on why we do what we do, not just what we do. Two- the resource I found for this looks at this through a Christian lens which has much more impact.
I’m sure there are many more little things I could hash out. Let me know if you wanna go deeper into this topic. And tell me your best relationship stabilizing advice (for any type of relationship)!