Inspiration for the New Year: Guest Post - A Deliberate Marriage Relationship

Today’s post comes from

Charlotte of “Joyful Heart and Faces”.

A Deliberate Marriage Relationship

Next month my husband and I will celebrate 16 years of marriage. When we were first married, I couldn’t imagine that I would ever have to work at my marriage; I loved this man so much and it had been so easy to fall in love with him.

In the next few years we had 4 beautiful children. We grew older. Time passed, and most days seemed like any other.

A couple years ago, I was going through my day and realized that I hadn’t kissed my husband in 4 days. That would have been unheard of in our first couple of years of marriage! What had happened? In some ways I think I had gotten too used to his presence. He would come home at the same time each day; we would eat dinner, play with the kids, read a little and then off to bed. Our marriage was not in any danger of ending, but maybe it was on its way to becoming stale.

And from some conversations with others, I knew I was not alone.

Why is it that our marriages get dull? Maybe I was taking my husband for granted. I needed to remember that being married was a blessing; his friendship was cherished. Or maybe I came into the relationship thinking I could change him. Maybe as we aged, both of us changed. But that shouldn’t matter; my perspective as a wife needs to be to love my husband for who he is, not who I want him to be.

Marriage does need work. I needed to put effort into our relationship. To become romantic again. To remember that he was and still is my best friend. Really, my relationship with him, after my relationship with my Savior, is the most important one I have. Someday my children will be starting their own families, and the friendships I have today might be gone or changed. But the one constant relationship I will always have until I die, is with my husband.

We need to be deliberate about our marriages and put the effort into it when it becomes uninteresting; before we grow so far apart that we don’t get along. And being deliberate means making some plans. One of the few things I have done is to plan a date night at least once a month with my husband. Sometimes it is out for a nice dinner, other times it is just a walk to a coffee shop. I make a point to kiss him at the door when he comes home at night. I make an effort to engage in conversations with him; good, meaningful talks about things that he is interested in. And we try to leave the kids with their grandparents once a year and get away for a couple of days, just the two of us.

The marriage relationship is so important. This year, don’t neglect your spouse. Be deliberate about your relationship. Make plans to foster your marriage. Remember your love.

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, [being the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married. --Stanley Hauerwas

Charlotte blogs at Joyful Hearts and Faces.  She lives with her family in sunny California where she is growing in grace every day.  She is a help meet to her husband, a stay at home mom to her four precious children, a homeschool teacher, and everything else that goes along with that description.  She enjoys cooking for her family, gardening, amateur photography, reading to her kids and spending quiet evenings with her husband. But most important she is saved by grace, unconditionally by our sovereign Savior.