Love is a Decision:

Before I was married, I told myself that I wasn’t going to stay married for the sake of it. I had seen a lot of that around me, and that’s not something that I wanted, but I also made a commitment that my children would have their father.

I discovered that those could be unpredictable things to manage at the same time.

Anyone that’s married knows that we often have lots of lofty ideas about how marriage works or should be until we get married and realise that every one of those ideas will get tested.

Additionally, when I was coming up with grand ideas, I didn’t consider childhood trauma. We fell in love 2004 and got married in 2005, and by year two, the coping mechanisms were evident.

Love is a decision

It was during those times of battling coping mechanism that the decisions to love got tested.

Love is patient and kind.

To keep my commitment to myself had to become familiar with the characteristics of real love.

I discovered that it’s not fanciful. It’s not sentimental, and it’s not romantic; it’s not only hearts and flowers and chocolate. It’s all of those things and sometimes none of them. Love is a decision that you make every day over and over again.

And there are days when even the sustainability of that decision gets tested.

Through that process of examination, I realise that the decision on its own was not sustainable. There was a lot of work needed. Without action, I would have to break all the promises that I made to myself.

I permitted myself to consider breaking my promises to myself, and it freed me from anybody else’s values or thoughts or ideas about what we should do how we should do it and what marriage was.

We had to look at ourselves honestly and coldly and make the decision about how we were going to stay married. It started with lots of uncomfortable conversations and challenging of our automatic responses.

Mine was withdrawal, I am introvert, so it was easy for me to go inside myself, and process internally. I was comfortable with self-reflection and coming up with solutions for me and my life. However, this time there was someone else there, and my internal processing looks to him like rejection and emotional abandonment which plays into his cycle. Without my support system, I wouldn’t have had the courage to confront and deal with this pattern.

Today we are happily married for 15 years because we face and continually deal with the habitual responses that threaten what we want to achieve in our union, through this process of continual evaluation and change.

• We learnt how to be vulnerable and honest with each other.
• How to be honest with ourselves and untangle from co-dependency.
• How to take responsibility for our pain and mistakes.
• We learnt that we are responsible for our happiness.
• We learnt that though we have family worship every day that on its own, will not sustain a marriage.
• We learnt that we couldn’t save each other. We each have to develop and maintain a personal relationship with Jesus.

Those things help us clear away what was not serving us and get back to the place where the decision to love became more comfortable and achievable each day.

It is an environment that moves closer to secure attachment and make the marriage a safe place for both of us.

A secure marriage isn’t a perfect marriage, but we happily fall into each other with the knowledge that together forever is one day at a time. Confronting us individually and facing the obstacles that present in the marriage.

We continue to learn to listen, grow and allow Christ to mould us. As I reflect on the journey between the, I do to fifteen years its nothing like I imagine.

Growing pains

I never knew that staying married would call out of me the kind of things that it did; I never knew that it would challenge me to my core and make me assess my values, who I am and who I want to be.

I have learnt to be tunnel vision to the kind of union that I want and not focus on what others have. It’s a work in progress, as long as I am alive, we will continue to work on us.

Marriage and spirituality

Despite all that, there’s one thing I know for sure. The spiritual side of our marriage leans heavily on the strength of my husband’s connection with Christ. It’s often been the place where I lean hard-on, and there are times when I wonder if my relationship is as secure if he needs to lean into it.

I never forget the night we were arguing about something that seems trivial now and had gone to bed upset. I know all the clichés that we shouldn’t go to bed angry, but we did. As I was sleeping the sleep that was not satisfying I woke up in the early hours of the morning about 2 or 3 am and I turned around, and he wasn’t in bed, I opened my eyes to look for him and spotted him kneeling by the bedside, praying.

He must have stayed there all night. After seeing that I went to bed comforted and slept well, all my anger melted away, and I knew it was going to be ok because he was praying.

“A part of growth is listening to the other person’s story. For me, it’s knowing that I can never fully understand his actions until he explains them. Growth means giving him the room to follow his thoughts and find ways to express them. I now know that I don’t have to always agree with what he thinks and vice versa. We might not even accept each other’s thoughts and opinions, but we’ve learned to hear them. That has made more difference in our marriage than anything else.” excerpt from ‘Shattered but not broken’ by Joanna Daniel.