Marriage
We have been asked a million times, "How's
married life?" and it's my favorite question to answer. Marriage is nothing
like I thought it would be. I always pictured being married to be like it
is in the movies, perfect, and it is the furthest thing from it. But it's the
imperfections of life that make it so fun. It's burning breakfast until the
smoke alarm goes off and laughing about it, and trying to open a bottle of
champagne in the kitchen and having it explode everywhere and laughing
about it, and walking to the grocery store and buying too much and
dropping everything along the way of walking back home and laughing about it.
We have laughed through everything in our marriage and I am so thankful for it.
We wake up making each other laugh, and go to sleep making each other laugh. I
revel in these times of laughter and have found it's an essential key to making
the Marciniak household thrive.
We have been married for about 3 1/2 months and
it still feels so surreal. For 17 months we have waited to be joined as one and
we did everything possible to prepare for marriage and I firmly believe it has made
the transition into married life so much easier and so filled with joy. It's a
running joke that we had about 10 different marriage counselors in our year and
a half long engagement and it help us prepare for the hard times. It
helped us see that the little things that annoy us and upset us are not worth
the fighting and anger that they can bring out.
In our few months of being married we have discovered
these few quirks about each other:
Tommy
-Never closes the shower curtain when he's done
showering, but now it's a joke and when he does remember to close it we
sing a song and do a little dance
-Leaves his shaving cream bottle on the counter
and it always leaves a ring around it
Jasmine
-Likes to hit Tommy in the face in the middle of
the night while we are sleeping
-Doesn't like to keep the door open when she
showers so it gets really foggy when Tommy is trying to see himself in the
mirror to shave
It's the little quirks of each other that make us
laugh and realize that getting mad over the stupid things isn't worth it. We
are learning to apologize quickly, and being right isn't worth the
cost of hurting your spouse.
One crucial lesson we have learned in our
dating/engagement/married life is to never ever put your spouse
down publicly, and never correct them in front of others.
I definitely struggle with this more than Tommy and I have learned
that it doesn't matter if what he is saying is completely wrong, just agree
with him no matter what. It's a respect thing for guys and I never knew how
hurtful it was to correct Tommy in front of our friends and family over the
most insignificant things. If any of you have ever struggled with this,
you know how challenging it is to overcome, but you can do it! Just think
of how great your spouse will feel when they know you respect them in front of
others.
I undeniably am no expert in marriage, and
even though things are easy now, we know the hard times will come and to cling
to each other and cling to Jesus when they do, but I am so thankful for my
husband and I love to brag on how awesome he is (he says he hates it when I do
but I’m not sure if that’s accurate J).
We have also discovered that we have to be
careful about who we tell our wonderful marriage stories to, because unfortunately
there are people out there who speak negatively over marriage and who keep
telling us that the ‘good feelings’ will end and we will soon hate each other.
I pray for these people to find joy in their marriage and to stop berating
others in their times of joy.
We also wanted to say thank you to all of
you guys who have been praying for our marriage and us. We feel your prayers
all around and we love having an awesome support system surrounding us.
Love,
The Marciniaks!
