Week 13 - Creating an ETERNAL Marriage

I am in the stage of life where I am married with no children. My husband and I are working toward creating a family, but it hasn’t happened yet. In “Till Debt Do Us Part” by Bernard Poduska, he talks about the different life cycle challenges that we go through.

Poduska talks about how the transition from being single to be married is sometimes difficult. I can definitely agree with this, as this is sort of the stage that I am in. When Jeferson and I got married it was sometimes difficult to include him on things that I used to do by myself.

Poduska said, “During this transition we realize that we must replace much of the autonomy we experience as a single person with a sense of togetherness. Togetherness does not mean becoming inseparable, nor does it mean losing all personal identity. It does mean that both individuals must commit themselves to thoughtful consideration of the consequences of their actions on their partners.”

I have met quite a few couples who are in the same stage of life as I am, and I feel like a lot of couples think that because they are supposed to include each other and have that ‘togetherness’, they have to be with each other all the time. This isn’t necessarily true. Do we want to include our spouse in our lives? Of course we do, but that doesn’t mean that we have to be together all the time. Like Poduska said, we don’t want to lose all of our personal identity because we feel like we need to be together all the time.

Marriage is not an easy thing. It’s hard, and it takes a lot of work. Both partners need to be continually progressing together.

Poduska said something else that really hit me. He said.

“Love ‘cannot be expected to last forever unless it is continually fed with portions of love, the manifestation of esteem and admiration, the expressions of gratitude, and the consideration of unselfishness.’”

I love this. If we want healthy relationships, and marriages that last, then we need to do our best to keep that love alive. This means that we need to make sacrifices, and compromise, and sometimes do things that we don’t want to do in order to make our spouse happy. This also means that we never give up on each other despite the flaws that our spouse may have. We all have them and we need to work together as a couple to overcome them. If we continuously do these thing OUT OF LOVE then our marriages will flourish, and that’s all anyone wants. Right?