Blog Post #4: My Two Cents on…Marriage
Getting married is the easy part; marriage is the hard part. Like many other meaningful ventures, we must work to see success, especially in a marriage that involves two people and is an organic and constantly evolving union requiring us to continually work and move in the same direction. We can hope that a marriage will take on a life of its own, becoming self-sufficient, but the truth is that it requires constant effort and attention daily. To provide the best care, we must constantly examine our marriage relationship, not where it was yesterday but where it is today.
In the beginning, it is easy to see the need to work and get to know each other; the newness of the marriage makes it easy to dedicate the time and energy needed. Love is at the forefront of our minds and actions. It is exciting, and the joy is in discovering each other, what it means to be married, and starting to forge a partnership that becomes more than the individuals. A new marriage can be the beginning of something bigger, something that gives strength and joy in ways not expected.
A few years in, we might expect our marriage to be self-sufficient and lose sight of the need to cultivate it. But with time, new needs and requirements are necessary to keep a marriage fresh, happy, and prosperous. As we get to know each other better, we might think that we are no longer new to the ‘marriage game’ and have things under control. Add to that children, family, and careers, and we may be tempted to put our marriage on autopilot. However, it might be time to look at our marriage and see if we can enhance it in ways we could not initially. Because marriage evolves with us, we must look for new ways to build and grow together, remembering that just as we are not the same as on the day we said, “I do,” neither is our marriage.
A few more years into marriage, even more of us might feel the weight of life and lose sight of our marriage. We should remember that our marriage is organic, and at this stage, you might feel it requires too much of your attention and energy to be sustained. We might see it as one more thing we need to take care of, which could lead us to frustration without even realizing it. But we must continue to work on our marriage and see it as the creation of our love, designed to bring us together rather than apart.
A couple of decades into marriage, if we are not careful, we can, somewhere along the way, move from partners working together in a marriage to two people living together in a house. We may not realize this until our lives have slowed, our children have grown and gone, and we find ourselves with more time together and fewer words to say to one another. But if we have worked at it, our partner and our marriage will be intact, and we can find joy in being together, peace in quiet solitude, and a sense of love and comfort that much younger couples could not imagine or comprehend.
For what it’s worth, my two cents on marriage…is that it is a beautiful, evolving creation and not a static state of being. It requires time, love, dedication, energy, and effort and can bring you a lifetime of joy, but only with a lifetime of work.