“What’s your secret to a long and happy marriage?” I asked my patient who had been married for over sixty years as I re-dressed her bandage.
I was a brand new nurse, just out of college and excited to see what life had in store. I always loved those rare moments when I was able to enjoy a conversation with patients well beyond my years and learn about their life, wisdom, and experiences. I was impressed at the number of patients I met who had been married for fifty-plus years, and even more amazed by those who still loved their spouse.
“Don’t go to bed angry.”
“Choose to love even when you don’t feel like it.”
“I married my best friend.”
It did not take me long to realize that I was not going to find a “secret recipe” with guaranteed results. The answers I received to that question varied drastically and were sometimes even conflicting. However, I did observe some common threads in the couples who seemed to still maintain their relationship even in the middle of a crisis. There was grace for imperfection, forgiveness in failure, and love that went deeper than emotion.
“In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad…”
As a nurse, I was working with patients and families in their seasons of sickness and bad times. At that time in my life, my crisis was surviving numerous “hell shifts” as a new grad when it felt like the unit was going down in flames. Just as my patients whose marriage relationships shone in the middle of a crisis, those chaotic shifts were transformed to being manageable and even fondly memorable when I was working with the right team members.
My husband and I started dating as I was finishing my first year working as a nurse. On our “first date” (a matter that is still up for debate!), we were hiking and he shared his life story with me. I was amazed that this man had lived through challenges and overcome obstacles that seemed foreign to my experience. I was encouraged by his story of how God’s grace and love had shaped who he was, and challenged by his heart to use his story to connect and work with at-risk youth.
As our relationship grew, it was different from any other I had experienced before. Initially, it wasn’t all “fireworks” and falling in love. Instead, I had a peaceful understanding that this person I was getting to know was someone I could walk through “hell on earth” with… and we would come out the other side okay. When I did begin to fall in love with him, I had a growing confidence that “this is it. This is the man I’m going to marry.”
And the rest is history…
I would love to tell you it was as simple as us falling in love, getting married, having two beautiful children, leaving the job I loved as a nurse to spend more time at home with the family I love in the tropical paradise of Thailand. But that would be the Instagram version of our life.
Polished
Staged
Edited
During our wedding, our first dance was to “Dancing to the Minefields” by Andrew Peterson. The chorus includes the following versus:
“And we went dancing in the minefields
We went sailing in the storms
And it was harder than we dreamed
But I believe that’s what the promise is for”
Ten days after our wedding, we sailed our first storm. My husband was in a terrible car accident that totaled his car. Later, when we saw the car we were shocked he was able to walk away from the accident with only a major scalp wound and a concussion. That night as we were leaving the Emergency Room, in spite of his pain and dizziness, he walked over to the driver’s side of the car and opened the door for me to get in.
“Click”
I made a snapshot of that moment because in that instant I knew I had chosen well when I said “I do.”
Our first year of marriage I struggled. I felt like living in such a close relationship brought out the ugly side of me and I didn’t like who I saw in the mirror. Before marriage, I would have described myself as a patient, kind, and loving individual. After marriage, I saw how quick I was to be critical, impatient, and hold a grudge. Within our first few months I shifted into an emotional plateau where I felt calloused and jaded. I was not sure why this shift paralleled our first year of marriage.
As we neared our first anniversary, I began to suspect that my new birth control may have affected my mood and emotions. I decided to come off that birth control and within a month, I was feeling like my normal self. I was very excited to know that a lot of my emotional challenges that we weathered during our first year were due to the hormonal changes caused by a pill and not problems with our marriage.
I did not experience the blissful, care-free, honeymoon phase of marriage that some people speak of in the first years of marriage. But I am thankful for the challenges we faced in our first year, because they strengthened our relationship to be better grounded in other life storms that were to come. It set me off on a journey I am still walking: learning to not live under a facade, not feel like I have to maintain the appearance of being put together, not strive to be a people pleaser. In that season, my husband showed me what it looked like to have someone love me unconditionally and still delight in doing life with me despite my brokenness and failures.
It is easy to focus on discerning “when you know” during those months and years of dating. But I believe it is crucial in a healthy marriage for that knowledge to continually evolve. You will change; your spouse will change. It isn’t enough to just have that time in your dating past of when you knew they were the one for you. Because in challenging seasons, in your sickness and bad times, it will not suffice.
This is why I developed a habit early on of taking mental snapshots, to acknowledge and reflect on those moments. Today, it is the memory of yesterday when he got off work, drove me to Makro (the Thailand version of Costco) because he knows how stressed I feel driving in the afternoon Bangkok traffic and how I hate going to that store solo with two little kids.
“Click”
It is not a glamorous moment. But I am still reminded that every day I choose him as the love of my life, I know I choose well.
Unfortunately, I cannot provide a recipe for a good marriage that is “tried and true”, has been passed down through generations and guarantees a good result. Life is full of broken, imperfect moments with flawed people. But even broken pieces can be turned into an exquisite mosaic. So collect the moments with your spouse when you experience grace in your imperfections, forgiveness in your failures, and love beyond emotion. Because when you hang onto those pieces and years later lay them out before you, you will see beauty even in the seasons when you walked through hell on earth together, but you made it out okay.
