Mike Rutledge.CA

9 years ago today I met the woman who would become my wife. It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed since then. 5.5 years of dating, 3.5 years of marriage, 1.5 year old girl, a boy on the way, bought a home, lead a church, 9 years. And that’s just some highlights, not to mention the trials, the fights, and the struggles, that 9 years can hold. It’s been a pretty amazing, soul changing, and joyful 9 years and I am praying for not just another 9, but 90 if God lets us live that long.

Because I have been thinking on these 9 years together, I thought I would offer 9 quick thoughts on relationships and marriage that I have learned or am learning more every day.

1. After this long, you aren’t the same person anymore, but hopefully you’re a better version of you.

I know this sounds obvious, but the longer you are in a relationship with someone the more you change. This happens by virtue of just time passing but also because of them. One of the amazing things about a good marriage is that it will make you a better person. Your spouse influences you in ways you don’t always notice, but they slowly begin to balance you out, smooth the rougher edges, bring out your natural gifts, and encourage your calling. A side of your soul is revealed that would have otherwise lain dormant. It’s a beautiful change. But, it will also be a refining fire for your character and maturity. And the longer you get into it, the more you realize how flawed and particularly selfish you can be. This to is a grace that we need to receive, cherish, and use to become the kind of person we are meant to be.

2. They aren’t the same person anymore, but hopefully they’re a better version of them.

The longer you are in a relationship with someone, the more they change. They are not the same person you met, and the hope of your heart should be that they are now a better person because of you. Your goal should be the holistic flourishing of your spouse. The cultivation of their soul. Loving the person your spouse is becoming more than the person they were. I have discovered that over the last 9 years my wife is not some utterly new person that I had to keep falling in love with, but really, what has happened is that the beauty and depth of her soul has been more clearly revealed through the different seasons of life. She is all the more captivating as she has blossomed into the women that she was made to be and as she becomes more like Jesus, being refined though our marriage and motherhood. After this long together, I don’t love the idea of what my wife was, but who she is.

3. You reap what you sow.

Marriage is no a walk in the park. But, the power and beauty of the grace filled covenant that is meant to be at the core of marriage, is that the promise of commitment and unselfish love sustains the marriage through the hard times, the failure, the fights, the come what may of life. Now, that doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t take work. And one the easiest sins in marriage to fall into is not some radical failure but the everyday complacency that slowly erodes a relationship. Complacency in pursuit. Complacency in communication, in growth, in joy, in laughter, in romance. Marriage can easily become a dull gray instead of vibrant colour it is meant to be, not because of some major sin, but because of selfish laziness, complacency. One of the greatest abuses of a marriage covenant is taking for granted the one whom promised to remain true to you always. Marriage is infinitely better when you refuse to be complacent. Marriage is romance at work.

4. Honesty has to be cultivated.

Given what we just said, one of the areas that you most definitely need to cultivate intentionally is honesty. Honesty is especially easy to loose when you have grown lukewarm towards one another because by nature we hide. We hide our shame, hide our mistakes, hide our failure. We tend to drift away from vulnerability, even in a marriage. There can many reasons for that, but nonetheless, marriage is meant to a relationship where nothing is hidden. We need to keep honesty at the forefront and that is what the covenant is for, a grace filled place to be painfully known. You don’t just happen upon this kind of vulnerability, you don’t get there by mistake, you don’t open up and invite your spouse in without intention. We need to do that hard work of honesty.

5. Intimacy has to be cultivated.

But vulnerability is only half the battle. True intimacy is not just being honest with our shame and mistakes, but also with the totality of who we are. The dreams, the hopes, the fears, and the desires. Ironically, it can feel just as hard sometime to be fully honest with the positive things of us. For example, it can be scary to actually voice a dream that you have – what if they don’t think it’s very good? What if they don’t think I can do it? Or how about our real feelings about something… if I told them how I feel really, happy, or sad, or anxious, about this thing, will they understand? Will they disregard that? But this kind of intimacy is at the heart of marriage, and intimacy is a choice everyday to be a naked soul with your spouse.

6. Communication has to be cultivated.

This is something that I have been learning recently. Communication doesn’t naturally just get better with time. In fact, bad habits and lack of communication will probably just get worse if its not worked on. Communication in a relationship has to be cultivated. It has to be worked on. It has to be given intentional effort. So, work on it. Be honest with each other about this. You both need to able to humbly receive the feedback that maybe you aren’t as clear in communicating as you think.

7. You need to learn from the bad, but focus on the good.

Generally – and hopefully – at the end of the day there will be more good, funny, joyous, cute, silly, sincere, etc. moments than bad, fighting, tension filled moments. But the thing is, it’s easier to dwell on the negative because they can seem more significant due to the scarcity and emotion of them. And obviously, the longer you are in a relationship, the more opportunity you have for good and for bad. So, choose to learn from the bad, but focus or remember or reminisce about the great times. Cultivate that sense of joy by choosing to replay together and by yourself, the moments where laughter squeezed every tear out of your eyes, where romance took your breath away, where the cuteness was in overdrive, where the sweet contentment of just being together was enough. Have a long – maybe written – memory of the good moments and good things about each other.

8. Don’t waste your precious time on prideful fights.

I regret the countless hours I wasted being mad at Emily, or causing us to be in a fight way longer than needs be simply due to stubborn pride. Whether it was because I didn’t want to be wrong, or getting to far into an argument that by the time you realize you are wrong to much is invested, or bringing up more issues that don’t relate to make a case that you aren’t the only flawed one. It is literally one of the most useless things you can do to ruin a night, ruin a moment, ruin an opportunity to grow closer together. Choose forgiveness. Choose humility. Choose them over yourself. You will never regret that.

9. Have a plan, but realize that life hardly works out as you think.

It’s good to have goals together and individually, to have a vision for your life, have a plan that you want to achieve, but at the end of your life, what will matter more than whether you your achieved all your dreams or not, is that you had your spouse with you. Reality is this, life hardly works out as you want or planned, jobs changed, loss happens, suffering comes, opportunities you didn’t expect pop up, and so your marriage needs to be flexible and adaptable, and willing to work it out together. But it also needs to be grounded in the simple realization that in marriage, if the flourishing of your spouse isn’t your chief aim, you never truly loved them. That might sound a little extreme, but what is love if not the emptying of me for the benefit of another? The power of a good marriage is that if both people are loving like that, both will flourish and both will be fulfilled regardless of whether the plan happened or not.

Longevity is only to celebrated really if that at the end of it there is greater life and love than at the start. And I know that marrying Emily has been that for me, and so celebration is certainly in order. 9 years, in the span of our entire relationship, will in the grace of God only be a fraction. And if the kind of life and joy and love that has happened is an indicator of what will be, that I can say with certainty that I am excited about what the future holds.