Abby and Eason,
Today’s letter isn’t about the end of my marriage. It’s about the middle and the lessons I learned in the middle. I hope they will help you when, one day, you get married.
When I got married, I moved to another state. I moved from a place where I was involved in regular community to a place where I knew no one. The day I moved my husband and I drove separately. He took the car while I drove a giant U-haul. He didn’t know it but I cried about half of the way to my new home.
My first mistake in marriage proved to be one I would make over and over. I didn’t talk. I didn’t tell my husband how badly I was hurting. I tried to just be okay for his sake. I thought it would hurt him if he knew that I was sad to be leaving my friends and moving to his city.
“Moving to his city” is probably a bit of a stretch! He had only moved to that city about 3 months before me. He had a job transfer, so the city was new to both of us. And this was our second mistake. We did not get involved in building a community in our new city. We were on an island. We depended on each other to figure out this marriage thing instead of finding people in our local community to do life with. We both had people in our old cities but in our new one, we were alone.
Having had people to challenge us, encourage us, and support us would have made a big difference in our lives. Isolation is another mistake we would continue to make throughout our marriage.
The first year we were married was actually great. We had challenges but mostly, we had a super year. But, it all changed on day 366. It was on that day that I found out that the isolation mistake we had made would be one of the reasons our marriage ended. My husband had made a promise before we were married and agreed to execute it on day 366. I didn’t know about the promise until day 366, and it was a promise that would forever change my life and cause pain like I had never imagined.
It isn’t worth the time it would take to explain the promise and all of the challenges we faced for the next few months. But the spiral downward was at a roller coaster or space ship pace. Everything we had done wrong came back to haunt us instantaneously. We didn’t communicate. We had expectations that were focused in all of the wrong places. We didn’t have a community to help us figure out how to manage the hard times. We lived in isolation. And, we were looking to one another to “fix” problems we weren’t capable of fixing – the problems we needed Jesus to fix.
The Bible tells us to have no other gods before God (Exodus 20:3). We had a lot of them. We had the god of independence (not talking/thinking we could fix all of our problems), arrogance (believing we could have a great marriage without others speaking into our lives), idols (placing one another as a god in our lives), and many more. We depended on any god, except for the one true God. We mostly made ourselves gods.
So, our marriage ended – quickly. Honestly, it happened before I even knew what was happening. It seemed like it started with a promise that would never have been made if Jesus had been at the center of our marriage. But the truth is, it started long before that. It started when we did not ask Jesus if He planned for us to be married. We just married because we wanted to (or at least I did. I am not sure if my husband asked Jesus if we should be married).
So, my advice continues to be the same – seek Jesus!
I love you both,
Mom