Our Marriage, 5 years later: Happily Ever After, or is It?

“What movie do you want to watch?” my Mom asked.

“Sleeping Booty, Mama! Sleeping Booty,” I replied in my 4 year old voice.

Years pass.

I celebrate my 9th birthday and am so excited to have a Beauty and the Beast theme. I still can picture the cake: Belle, dark hair, big brown eyes, lover of books, basically me, just grown up.

Years pass.

Ever After (the real live Drew Barrymore, Cinderella- anyone?!), How to Lose a Guy in 10 days, watched on repeat, Two Weeks Notice, Sweet Home Alabama, While You Were Sleeping, You’ve Got Mail, Pretty Woman, Father of the Bride, Never Been Kissed, Sleepless in Seattle, Runaway Bride, The Holiday, 27 Dresses, The Proposal, and countless others. I grew up during the golden era of chick-flicks (what happened to those, anyway?) Now days (look at me sounding old by using phrases like now days), I cannot seem to think of a good old fashioned chick flick that isn’t full of raunchy humor, but I digress.

Princesses. Fairy Tales. Chick Flicks. I ate this stuff up. (and I’m not saying it’s bad to watch these things, I loved them)

Boy and Girl meet, and get married and live happily ever after or some version of that story fed to us over our life time.

I’m 16. I stand in front of my church’s youth group and pledge in the True Love Waits movement. I wear a ring (that has a cross on it) on my left finger that I plan to give to my future husband one day.

Years pass.

I hear a sermon. The guy talking recommends praying for your future spouse and maybe even writing letters to him or her. The type-A-loves-a-list-rule follower in me takes this to heart. I start writing letters at 18. I don’t stop until age 28.

Years pass.

High school. College. Working as a teacher. No dates. No one shows any interest.

There is much to say here, years of waiting, trusting, leveraging my season of singleness to love my students well, impact the Kingdom through mission trips (Egypt, China, India), serving the church body, some nights of crying and longing and wondering with my roommates if our men were really out there, but that is for another post (on singleness), but the long story short is God did in fact bring an incredible man into my life when I was 27 years old. From the very beginning, I felt a peace dating him and as we continued in our relationship (again, I could write so many more details here, but that is for another post as well), God quickly confirmed that we were on the same page. This is the one I had been praying for for a decade. Bryan proposed 6 months (almost to the day) after meeting him. For those of you who love a good proposal story, you can read that story here.

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Before the ceremony, we decide to skip on the first look (we are old-fashioned that way), but did pray together before and handed each other a letter (or in my case about 40, remember all those letters I had been writing for a decade?!)

We find ourselves standing before one another, a church FULL of people and our Good, Good God pledging our lives to one another in a convenant relationship for life.

Our vows (which we have failed again and again at keeping. Thankfully we don’t give up on each other and God doesn’t give up on us (Phil 1:6))

And then we lived happily ever after? Right? Isn’t that what 5 years of posts on social media show? Lest you believe the lie that our marriage (or any for that matter) is “perfect”, here is some real-ness for you. We have incredibly sweet, wonderful and great days and we have our super hard days. We have times when I think, “God, how in the world did you see fit to bring us together? (as in, I just don’t deserve this good gift)”, and times when I think, “God, WHY in the world did you see fit to bring us together? (didn’t I “deserve” better?)” I remember hearing my youth pastor in high school mention something to the effect of sometimes he loved his wife simply because she is his wife and sometimes because he just had all these loving feelings toward her.

I read similar words by Tim Keller when we were engaged, “In any relationship, there will be frightening spells in which your feelings of love dry up. And when that happens you must remember that the essence of marriage is that it is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what do you do? You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling. You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must BE tender, understanding, forgiving and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become more constant in your feelings. This is what can happen if you decide to love.”

I couldn’t fully understand what they meant then, but I do now. It is one thing to “know” something intellectually, because someone told you or your read it in a book (remember this type-A girl likes to be prepared), but it is a whole other thing to know something experientially.

Isn’t it funny how most stories I mentioned above were about the meeting and dating, the beginning of a relationship and not what came after. Sure, some have sequels (hello Father of the Bride, Part 2), but many do not. We see the happy couple riding off and think they have just reached the pinnacle of their life. Or better yet, is when you see a flash forward like in Notting Hill- Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts sitting on a park bench and you see her big pregnant belly, now that is definitely a happily ever after. I mean, seriously, what more could a girl want?

These 5 years of marriage have been FULL. When we stood before each other June 15, 2013 and said our vows, we had no idea what that would practically look like 4 months later as we lost our first baby due to miscarriage, or a little over a year later when we welcomed C into our family and so struggled during his first several months to find any sort of rhythm. We did not know the fullness of what we were saying YES to, the many late nights, the expectations, the financial surprises, the home purchases (2) and devastations, the job changes, the two more surprise boys we added to our family (props to my patient husband as he’s had a wife that has been pregnant or nursing for 4.5 years straight without any breaks), the day to day exhaustion that comes with raising little kids, the loneliness this season of life can bring, the days where we just barely seem to get it all done before we crash into bed next to each other to go to sleep.

We spent nearly the whole first year of marriage working our way through those letters I had written Bryan for a decade, before I even knew his name. I didn’t remember writing many of them. They were full of prayers, hopes, longings. Sometimes I would tuck away sermon notes, song lyrics I liked, scripture references, or simply tell him about my day. Those letters were a beautiful thing for me when I wrote them, but sometimes, they could be a little crushing. You see, I wrote those letters to my “idea” of who my husband would be. And though I knew he could not be perfect (I mean NO ONE is except Jesus), if I’m honest, I thought he was going to be pretty close. I mean, I had waited for what felt like SO LONG. My life was like the true version of Never Been Kissed. God had protected me from so much. People would often tell me (trying to be encouraging), “Ashley, just wait! Your husband has to be just SO incredible. I bet he is a missionary somewhere, or a pastor. He is just going to be beyond your wildest dreams, so perfect for you.” And let me ask you, who can live up this? Though I had fought it with every ounce of my being, I had put this future “husband” of mine on a pedestal. I knew marriage was not promised to me, and I had prayed that God would take away the desire if it wasn’t something He had for me. I had prayed He would be my first Love. When God finally gave me what I had longed for my entire adult life, I quickly became disappointed when my expectations were not meant. Ladies, let me tell you- if you are a wife or plan to be one day, learn from my mistakes- do not place unrealistic expectations on your men. No man is every piece of the pie, and if you think he is, you just don’t know him well enough yet. Because no woman has it all either. You know yourself. Are you flawed? 100% YES! We did all the things. We did premarital counseling and had an amazing mentor couple. We benefited from some incredibly solid teaching the first year of our marriage in a newly wed class at our church, but no amount of teaching can dethrone the idols in your heart. The truth is the gifts are never meant to satisfy. The gifts can never replace the GIVER. They are just gifts, meant to point up to the goodness of the One they came from.

I had to learn the hard way (through lots of misunderstanding, harsh words, hurt feeling, tears), Marriage WILL NOT COMPLETE YOU. I will say it again. MARRIAGE WILL NOT COMPLETE YOU. And there is no perfect person out there for you. And when we got married at 25 and 28 (yes, I am a “cougar”, but not really….technically it has to be 7 years), we were different people than we are now at 30 and 33.

From The Meaning of Marriage , “Over the years you will go through seasons in which you have to learn to love a person who you didn’t marry, who is something of a stranger. You will have to make changes that you don’t want to make, and so will your spouse. The journey may eventually take you into a strong, tender, joyful marriage. But it is not because you married the perfectly compatible person. That person doesn’t exist.” Remember that your husband (or wife) is a GIFT.

Is Love a feeling or a choice? Is it an action or a statement?

We have learned so much about what it means to truly LOVE. Love means continually forgiving. As Ruth Bell Graham so wisely said, “A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.”

Again and again and again. I have tears in my eyes as I think of the ways that we have hurt each other with our words, but by God’s grace have forgiven one another. Love means choosing day in and day out to be for each other. Love means never giving up. Love means looking for ways to lay down your own wishes, hopes, desires, goals and put the other person ahead of yourself (and let me tell you, God blessed me beyond measure in Bryan Hughes in this category). Love means changing the dirty diapers, doing the laundry, packing the lunches, taking care of the kids, reading one more book, putting gas in the car , listening to each other, remembering to ask questions that get to deeper levels. (For the first few years we used to ask each other intentional questions every Sunday- we need to bring that back in this crazy season. They were something like: 1)How did you feel loved this past week 2) What does your upcoming week look like 3) How can I pray for you 4)What would most make you feel loved this week ) Love is choosing to build up with my words instead of tear down. Love is holding my tongue. Love is looking for ways to praise. Love is acknowledging. Love is remembering to not take him for granted and remembering to say, “thank you” for the small things he does every single day. Love is stopping to look at each other in the midst of the chaos.

Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It is not proud, it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoices at wrongdoing, but rejoices with truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Marriage won’t make you happy. It isn’t meant to. Yes, it can bring moments (hopefully many) of happiness, but that is not its primary purpose. Marriage is holy. Marriage is sacred. It is meant to sanctify (but and “they sanctified each other ever after” doesn’t sound nearly as good). What does it mean to sanctify? Sanctification is the process of becoming more and more like Jesus in all that you think, say, and do. Marriage is meant to represent the Gospel (“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”-Timothy Keller) between Christ and the church. It is a beautiful picture of an eternal truth. Marriage is hard work, at least a true, deep, thriving marriage is. Marriage is saying here is me, all of me for the rest of your life, every single day, accepting the other fully.

Fully known and fully loved (As Timothy Keller says in The Meaning of Marriage , “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”).

God has used marriage to humble me like nothing else (with motherhood being a close second). It is easy to think as a “good girl” that you may deserve certain things (check out this book if you struggle with this: Grace for the Good Girl: Letting Go of the Try-Hard Life). That is the lie our culture tells us. The truth of the Gospel is this: because of our sin, we deserve death, but God gives us the gift of life through Jesus’s death and resurrection. It is truly nothing but the blood of Jesus that saves us (there is truly no one who is good but Him). Lately, our boys have been requesting, Nothing but the Blood by Citizen on repeat lately. They call it “bug a bug a bug of Jesus” and I think God has had them attach to this song lately to be a constant reminder to me of this fundamental truth, lest I forget and think I can somehow make myself good by my works.

So, this day, our 5th anniversary, Bryan, my love, I choose you. Thank you for choosing me, all of me and the mess that I am. You are truly the love of my life and my husband ’til heaven. Thank you for committing to continue to learn how to love each other well for the rest of our lives.

Practical Tools:

For those of you who love a few practical tips, here are some great books:

The Meaning of Marriage

Love & Respect: The Love She Most Desires; The Respect He Desperately Needs

The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?

Books and tools can be helpful, but at the heart of it, the hardest part is learning to die: to die to yourself and to put another before you. We must both choose to give all of who we are every single day. It’s like the lyrics from the song we danced to at our wedding (and the name of my *technically* second blog, Dancing in the Minefields)

I was nineteen, you were twenty-one
The year we got engaged
Everyone said we were much too young
But we did it anyway

We bought our rings for forty each
From a pawn shop down the road
We made our vows and took the leap
Now fifteen years ago

We went dancing in the minefields
We went sailing in the storm
And it was harder than we dreamed
But I believe that’s what the promise is for

“I do” are the two most famous last words
The beginning of the end
But to lose your life for another I’ve heard
Is a good place to begin

‘Cause the only way to find your life
Is to lay your own life down
And I believe it’s an easy price
For the life that we have found

And we’re dancing in the minefields
We’re sailing in the storm
This is harder than we dreamed
But I believe that’s what the promise is for

So when I lose my way, find me
When I loose love’s chains, bind me
At the end of all my faith, till the end of all my days
When I forget my name, remind me

‘Cause we bear the light of the Son of Man
So there’s nothing left to fear
So I’ll walk with you in the shadowlands
Till the shadows disappear

‘Cause he promised not to leave us
And his promises are true
So in the face of all this chaos, baby,
I can dance with you

photos from the talented Allie Harrington and Kodee Roraback.

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