Last month my Wife and I celebrated 15 years of wonderful marriage. We have had a great journey through life, totaling 20 years together, and every day has been an opportunity to grow more in love with one another. Since the beginning of our relationship, we have always looked at older couples who had been married 20, 30, 50+ years and wondered how they made it so long. Today, I would like to share a few things with you that have worked well in our relationship. I think our society is missing the boat on marriage because many couples refuse to follow these principles and absorb themselves in themselves instead of into their spouses. All information shared is based on our personal experiences and things we have done to be successful. Additionally, we could not have made it this far without a relationship with Jesus Christ as our savior to guide our household. Christ is the head of our home followed by myself as the leader and my wife as the primary nurturer, helper, and support column for our family. We believe in traditional marriage the way God intended and have seen how wonderful this can be (don't buy the 3d wave feminism hype).
Background
Before I share some of the things we do that have led to our success, I would like to provide a quick background. My wife and I met in High School during our Junior year. I truly believe we were led to each other through God as soul mates. We met through mutual friends at a church event and the rest is history. We dated for 5 years prior to getting married and spent our college years separated by a few hours while we attended different schools. My wife has always been independent but also very supportive. She pursued her own education, which is important and we learned to love one another, sacrifice together and trust each other while attending different schools.
We believed that spending ample time together before marriage was important to ensure we were compatible. It also allowed us to learn and grow together during our youth, as well as observe how we respond under pressure, financial stress, being around friends, being around the opposite sex independent of one another, and it taught us to trust and support each other's dreams. We truly believe that dating (without living together before marriage) for an extended period of time is wise and it worked for us.
After college, we set out to accomplish our dreams and got married the summer after graduation. We lived in an apartment together for a couple of years, got our first dog, moved into our first home, changed a few jobs and had a few children. The journey has been great, progressive in nature and so far very successful. We have made it a point to attend church and stay connected to friends similar to us for support. While marriage has bumps (ours have been small) it's always been more rewarding to us and we look forward to growing old together.
So what specific things do we try to do to keep our marriage going? Here are a few things we do that work for us and I believe they could help many other couples:
Be Selfless
One of the best things that happened in our marriage was reading and discussing the 5 Love Languages book together in our bible study group. Early on in our marriage, this allowed us to find out what needs the other person has and pointed us to work on fulfilling those needs. The purpose of the book is to focus on fulfilling the love language of your wife or husband vice focusing on your wife or husband filling your needs. In other words, instead of focusing on what your spouse is doing for you, focus on what you are doing for your spouse. This has to be a joint adventure and you have to take the time to convert your mindset over from selfish to selfless. This has to be a pact between both parties or you will burn out. Now, understand that you will hit peaks and valleys but make a conscious effort every single day to try and meet your spouse's needs. Also, if your spouse isn't meeting your needs, let it go for a little while and allow them to self-correct before nagging them. If this fails, the absolute worst thing you can do is start focusing on the negative and only reciprocating when your needs are met. This means both of you will have to work on this, it doesn't tend to come naturally to be selfless but it can be achieved through hard work. By the way, I know my wife's love language is acts of service and she knows mine is affection. We make a conscious effort every single day to meet each other's needs.
Love and Respect
I am not a psychologist but from my personal experience and everything I have read, women need love and men need respect. Simple. There is a great book on this called....you guessed it....Love and Respect. This book is well researched and goes into way more detail than I can provide here. I highly recommend reading this together, like the 5 Love Languages, and discussing your thoughts on it. Simply put for us, love and respect means loving and respecting one another. From a female/male perspective though it means a little more. I make it a daily goal to show my wife how cherished she is. She knows I support her, I think she is beautiful, I will take care of her, I will protect her, I will do my best to meet her hearts desires. Overall, she is the apple of my eye and the love of my life. She knows this because of my words and actions. She is reminded how beautiful she is daily by the way I look at her and the way I compliment her. She feels loved by the way I hold her. She feels respected by the way I talk with her and protect her and she feels supported by the way I act when she strives to meet goals. Likewise, she makes it a daily goal to love me, tell me how great I am, allows me to make decisions, supports those decisions, never belittles me or talks down to me, compliments me on my strengths both physically and non-physically and works to meet my needs. She never nags me for two reasons.
First, I rarely put her in a position to have to. I am not perfect but I try and preemptively strike on things I know she wants done. Second, it's degrading to a man to be nagged and talked to like a child. This is not respectful. Ephesians Chapter 5 of the New Testament is a fantastic model of how we were intended to live as married couples. It's often misconstrued by people as they don't understand and often misinterpret it as soon as it says for wives to be submissive. What they fail to leave out is that husbands are supposed to love and take care of their wives in a way most men in the 21st Century have forgotten about. When your wife respects you and follows you, you have an enormous responsibility to cherish her and take of her and to seek guidance and wisdom from Jesus Christ to fulfill that responsibility.
Focus on the Positive
This one is important. Make it a daily habit to focus on the positive aspects of your wife/husband and vice versa. This can't be stated enough. If you begin to focus on the negative, really in any aspect of life, it will consume you. In marriage, it will destroy you because you will start picking apart all of the flaws your spouse has. You will bypass all of the great things they do for you and start to gossip with friends and family about all of the bad things your wife/husband does. The best thing to do, if you start to focus on the negative, is to talk directly with your wife/husband and work through your problems. I have seen too many couples focus on the negative (typically little things) things their husband/wife does and it destroys them slowly. Another fatal move is gossiping about these negative things with family. Your family is inherently going to take your side and talking to them about all of the little negative things your spouse does will only degrade your bond. It will also bring tension into the family during family events and further distance your marriage.
I would say the exception to this is physical/mental abuse. If that is occurring, you should seek legal/support channels to remove yourself from a dangerous situation. Most of what I am talking about there are things like "Ugh my husband never puts the toilet seat down" or "Ugh my wife didn't make dinner exactly the way I like it". These may seem silly but If you start to meditate on the little things in a negative light, it will snowball and you will be blinded and deceived by this.
Personal Space/Friends
Another great thing my wife and I have done since we first started dating was to maintain personal space and mutual friendships. I was a little hesitant at first but I am so glad my wife was adamant about this. So what does this mean exactly? Well, we believe it's important to ensure that each of us gets a little time each month for ourselves. From time to time I go and shoot guns with my friends. From time to time my wife goes out to dinner or a girls night. We fully trust each other and we try to keep this at a respectable and acceptable level. If you are always going out with the "guys" or "girls" and leaving your wife/husband at home this can be dangerous in my opinion. But every person needs this alone time and separation to be a healthy adult. In addition to this, my Wife and I love building friendships with other couples and having them over for dinner, hang-outs or double dates. We try and incorporate other people into our lives at least once a week. This allows you to find people you can relate to and break up the monotony of daily life. By meeting new people and having groups of friends over you can really build a support network for your family when times get hard. We believe this is vital to a healthy marriage.
Communicate
Everyone talks about communication but what does it really mean? For us, it means being open and honest in a respectful manner and talk through your problems. Talking (not yelling/arguing/fighting/throwing things) if vital and really helps. We disagree all the time but it doesn't have to be damaging. What it does mean for us is that we talk about things in a rational way so that we can either resolve it or agree to disagree. There are no winners or losers in marriage, you are a team working towards a life together. If you're in it for competition against your spouse, you are looking at marriage in the wrong way. Talk with your husband/wife about things that need to change, things that bother your or things you want to do together and accomplish together. Support each other and build each other up.
In addition to the big hitters above, here is a list of things we frequently do to keep our marriage happy:
Date Night
Vacation
Discussing Future Plans
Discussing Monetary Plans
Planning
Complimenting Each Other
Giving Each Other Public Praise & Credit
Setting Positive Examples of A Loving Marriage In Front of Kids
Going to Church Together Consistently
Praying Together
Working Out Together
Dieting Together
Supporting Each Others Dreams
Loving Each Other
I hope you enjoyed this blog post and you took something away. Please feel free to leave comments/questions below and May God Bless your marriage!