Marriage is hard.........our expectations make it harder.

I’ll never forget my 22^nd birthday, it was the day that I thought to myself, “Yes! Thank God! Now I am old enough to get married.”

I know what you are thinking because now I am thinking it too, ‘Wait what?!? What did my dumb self just proclaim the young age with the high enough level of maturity to get married?’ Only that wasn’t exactly what I was thinking at all because truly I was too naïve to ever question what maturity had to do with marriage.

I was already engaged to be married at that time and I just thought 22 sounded like a better age to be making such a large life choice than just 21 did. I mean ‘who could take a 21 year old seriously?’ is what I was projecting. I knew I was not going to prove to myself or anyone else around me that this 21 year old girl, the age that’s basically the poster child for drunken irresponsibility, was mature enough to know what she was doing. I was truly thankful that I turned 22 in May before our wedding in June. I thought that month made a solid difference in how it would be perceived.

You can see my whole thought process was so sadly based on what I thought I “should be” doing based on the world’s standards. I worried about what my life appeared to be, what image I gave off and what all of it meant at the end of the day when inspected by my ‘critics.’ Mind you, this is all before social media became what it is now, so I’m talking the old school critics, like our own perfectionism, our parent’s voices in our head, our own critical misperceived expectations, not the real life fake friend critics people contend with today. Dear God, simply writing that sentence out and acknowledging what our children will contend with, on top of the usual mental gymnastics that comes with becoming a young adult, has me frightened to the core but that’s a whole other topic for another day.

The point is that at the beginning of my young adult life I wasn’t sure of much but for some reason numbers mattered to me, they represented something, and still do. So this year as my husband and I both turned 36, will celebrate our 14^th wedding anniversary and 18^th year together, I find myself looking back a lot analyzing what this year, 2018, represents to me. Perhaps it’s because I am in the thick of childrearing and 18 years represents an entire childhood that this thought occurred to me, but I recently started thinking of our 18 year relationship in terms of human development and our relationship took on a living form in my mind giving me such clarity and perspective.

Ever since I started viewing it through this lens I have really felt like if I had this view all along maybe I would have been more patient with us. Maybe viewing us as an every changing, growing person would have helped me extend the same grace I give my children to ourselves. I wish I thought about it like I do now, back then. With this perspective I really feel like there would have been more of an unconditional love and guidance tone to our love than there was a conditional expectation stance you’d only take with a grown up.

In the Bible, God says that when we marry we become one flesh. Clearly no one would expect an infant to perform as an adult, yet we expect our union to be perfect from day one. That simply makes no sense. It’s like giving a newborn a mortgage, 401K and voter registration card at birth. We have it all reversed. Expectations for a person should directly correlate to life experience the same way our expectations for our marriage should correlate to our opportunity to grow that relationship. The bar should be low in the beginning and we should raise it together as time goes on, trust builds, communication strengthens and love grows.

When I think about it that way I can see the disservice we did ourselves looking at it any other way. I can see how we were completely unrealistic about what marriage was going to be like. We met in college and the combination of young drunk love, and selfish immaturity was ripe for infancy. We were so needy, self serving, co dependent. Then right as we married we progressed to the preschool stage and questioned one another constantly, ‘but why, why do you do this or that’ constantly pestering one another with demands for explanations, that stage of our relationship in combination with it being our first year of living together as a married couple was rough! Our elementary age years weren’t much easier, each establishing a career, trying to flourish in our own independence outside of the home much like a busy child in school neglecting their other responsibilities, we left little time for connection at home and didn’t prioritize one another much. Then like an overburdened student trying to add on some extra-curriculars and still thrive we added children. Suddenly we were like pre teens with their first new jobs, overwhelmed and underequipped for this stage of life we made a lot of mistakes and learned how to face them and self correct for the first time on our own. 

This holy training ground is where our relationship got the messiest but we grew the most. I can look at it now and recognize the awkward adolescence of it all, it makes sense why it was so hard, we were growing up as one and had never done that before. It was like going through double the puberty, it was bound to get ugly. Yet at the time I judged our failures through the lens of my worldly expectations for us and with that came the thoughts of giving up and running away like a scorned teen.

I can now see that every time my expectations and reality did not match I automatically thought there was something wrong with my reality, I did not take time to check my expectations. I think this is a very easy trap to fall in when we are judging our marriages against the world. We can so easily fall prey to comparing our relationship to others. Much like a teenager thinks they are the only one with a dysfunctional family, we buy the lie that we are the only ones with a difficult marriage.

I know that was the case for me when we were growing up together and I wish I had someone ahead of me to tell me that we were just experiencing growing pains and that we’d make it to the other side stronger for it, which is my hope for sharing this with others.

Now, almost 18 years in, our love does kind of feel like we are a grown up most days but I know we are just still a dumb ‘kid’ in the eyes of experience.  We are bound to be overly confident and too self assured to see trouble coming if we are not careful. So we will use what we’ve learned this far and cautiously continue down this path of young adulthood reminding ourselves we don’t know it all and will always need guidance from the one who does. I for one just can’t wait until we are solidly in our 30s and feel as whole as I do now.