Embracing the Journey - Trials in Marriage

So many blogs I follow are authored by lovely ladies who are either engaged, seriously dating or are

newly weds. So many times people avoid talking about the realities of marriage because, well let's be honest

sometimes marriage is messy.  Before I was married all anyone said to me was

"marriage is hard" or "a good marriage takes work".

So although I haven't been married all that long myself, I wanted to

share some of the things I have learned and an insight into my reality of marriage.

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I love my husband dearly, but for some ignorant reason

I believed that once we were married, somehow that bond would prevent us from fighting.

I'm going to go ahead and tell you that I was wrong.  Plain wrong.
I tell people (on the rare occasion that I discuss this) that if our marriage could withstand
the first five months, then we were set for life!


When we were married, we paid for the wedding ourselves. Every last penny.
A huge accomplishment we're proud of, and we didn't go into any debt for it.
BUT, it meant we didn't have any savings for a season in life when we really needed some.


We got back from our Honeymoon & hit the ground running.
I literally spent the first night in our home alone. In fact I spent almost every night alone.
I was afraid to sleep in our bedroom alone (I'd never lived on my own before)
so I slept 5 of the 7 nights a week on our couch because John had to go to work.

John was finishing his Masters degree - thank Heaven he was down to a final Sports Law class that was entirely online and he also had to complete his Practicum - an internship with a Soccer Club about an hour from our house. In addition to working 32 hours a week for the Soccer team to complete his practicum requirement; he also worked full time as a night stocker at a Walmart - 35 minutes from home (in the opposite direction of his other job). You do the math... he never slept!

I was also working at Walmart full time (yay for our expensive college educations!)
and I cleaned houses and baby sat on the side.  We were both stretched so thin! (and did I mention we're a 1 car family??)

My Aunt Shannon said to me once after John and I were engaged that sometimes in marriage you have to wake up in the morning and decide that you still love your husband.

I think this was some of the best advice I have ever gotten!

John and I fought about everything.  It was easy to do when you were so tired, and so stressed
and so just Blah!  I honestly thought the marriage would fall apart.
We probably could have gotten a lot of good out of talking to other married couples about their hard times
but we were both so embarrassed that things were hard for us, especially so early in our marriage. It doesn't help that we don't know many married couples our age.
We both knew that we loved each other and it all came down to a promise.

We had just vowed to be faithful in the good times and bad.
In some ways we had a small cheat sheet for our marriage in that we knew things would get somewhat better
as soon as school was finished for him that May. We thought that if we could stick it out until then
all our problems would go away.

Well... they didn't. The stressful things honestly didn't truly settle out until about late September early October (9 months after we were married). But our marriage really took a turn for the better about April. We realized (and by realized I mean that we both screamed ourselves hoarse and threw embarrassing temper tantrums until it was out of our system and only then did we come to understand that BOTH of us had a lot going on and fighting only made things worse!) that yes, both of us would be grumpy sometimes. We would have short tempers but holding it against him and drudging up last weeks fight would only make matters worse. By the time John had graduated and gotten a job in his field and our lives had settled out into a normal routine I had figured out that life isn't just about me.

I know you're probably sitting there thinking, 'oh gosh, she really hates being married doesn't she?' - no actually I love it!  It's the best, most wonderful thing to ever happen to me but reality is that it does take

an investment of time and work!

I think that a lot of the lessons learned in the first six or so months of marriage were ones that every newly married couple has to learn. How to share a space with a person, always having your spouse around, accountability, responsibility, money and time management, etc. Our lessons were just complicated by our stress factor. 

I hope that this post just gives those of you who are maybe having a rocky time in your relationship hope that this is just for a season and life will settle out. Now that we are past our "hard time" (not to say that we don't have stress or occasionally disagree), I feel more comfortable opening up to friends and family about what we went through. 

Guess what, in no way were we alone. If you're struggling with how to adjust and settle in to a marriage. Maybe your marriage or relationship is taking a beating from the other stressors in your life, I really encourage you to take the time to talk to someone you trust about it! They will be able to offer you perspective and make encouraging pointers for ways you can help the problem. 

My advise: Marriage is giving 100% of yourself all the time and expecting nothing in return.

This blog post is a link up with The Unveiled Wife