Three Lessons I’ve Learned in Five Years of Marriage
When you take your wife out to dinner to celebrate your wedding
anniversary, you don’t necessarily plan on misspelling her name on her to-go
box, taking a leisurely drive through a local cemetery, or filling up your tank
at a seedy gas station. All those things did recently happen, and yet Shannon
and I still enjoyed the evening. (She also forgave me for the spelling
mistake—which is a big deal, coming from an English major.)
Yes, this past weekend Shannon and
I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. The time has both taken forever and
flown by. (Not quite sure how that happens.) In this short period, a lot has transpired.
I won’t bore you with the details, but I did want to share three things I have
learned—or, rather, am still
learning—at the outset of this lovely journey called marriage.
1. You can’t rightly love if you can’t rightly see love
The more I grow in the Christian
faith, the more I see how much of a difference there is between knowing something and believing something. I know God has
forgiven me, but I often think and act like He’s still holding a grudge against
me. I know God is patient and longsuffering, but I often think and act like God
is fed up with my imperfections and recurring sins.
When I see God in this negative
and inaccurate light, my actions toward others—especially behind closed doors,
when no one but my wife is present—are detrimentally affected. If I see myself
as under God’s condemning gaze, I can be tempted to be unforgiving toward
Shannon. If I see God as impatient toward my faults, I can be impatient toward
Shannon’s. It’s not a pretty picture.
But as I’ve been slowly learning
(specifically here
and here),
when I’m bulldozed over by God’s unrelenting, unconditional, and even joyous
love for me, I am better enabled to pour out that same mercy and grace on
Shannon. After all, if God’s disposition toward me is love, even though my sins
against Him have been grievous, how much more can I show a loving disposition
to Shannon, whose sins against me are exceedingly small in comparison? Yes, understanding
and truly believing the good news of
the gospel can radically change your marriage.
2. Your wife is the key to discerning the state of your
relationship
There’s an almost foolproof way to
test your marriage’s strength. How? By simply asking your wife how she thinks
things are going. I’ve had to swallow my pride several times, but Shannon’s perspective
has often led to course recalibrations that have served our marriage well.
Yeah, I know it’s easy to think
your wife tends to overreact when talking about the problems in your
relationship. It’s easy to dismiss many of her concerns as unrealistic or
emotional. But I think God has given women the unique ability to feel a
marriage’s pulse better than men.
If you really want to find out
where your marriage is strong—and where it needs improvement—ask for your
wife’s input. She might not always be able to explain it perfectly, but she has
a valuable perspective that you would do well to consider. Otherwise, you’re
basically shooting yourself in the foot. Yeah, you can still hop around, but
where’s the dignity in that?
3. As time passes, good marriages only get better
When you hear older couples talk
about how love, romance, and intimacy just get better and better, it’s tempting
to think that’s just a quaint ruse. But even only after a handful of years
behind us, we can see that those couples are right. Through God’s enabling
power, we’ve seen that sowing faithfulness and devotion into your marriage
reaps staggeringly good results.
Sure, there’s a sense in which our
life is getting harder too, but as I’ve pointed out earlier, nothing truly worth holding onto is easy. The most rewarding
things in life are those which require a lot of effort. Gold medals, financial
stability, successful children—all of these things, while ultimately the result
of God’s grace—come about through hard work and sacrifice.