HIS AND HER CLOSETS

Recently on Facebook someone posted that they were curious how a relationship goes from his and her closets to his and her attorneys.  If I am being honest this is a question that I have often pondered.  How could someone say "I DO" and then loose that love?  How can two people who said they were willing to stay together until death parts them, separate?  What happens to the love?  Do they forget their wedding vows?  Do they loose sight of what marriage is?  How does life change and make us so bitter that we give up on marriage, on each other?  

Our wedding day, December 5, 1997.

I must admit, after the week that Robert and I have had, I wondered if I could supply an answer to this question.  Please don't misconstrue me, I love my husband, but this week has been a week that made me question if marriage and fighting for a life together is always worth it. .Don't get me wrong, it was nothing major. There was no big AHA we shouldn't be married anymore moments; just a million little things that one experiences when a person has spent the last 17.5 years of life together as husband and wife and parents of little ones.  It's the ebb and flow of a life together, the struggle for autonomy while being one in the realm of marriage.  It is the living of life as "WE" instead of "ME".   It is the fact that we are both imperfect people trying to become one and not loose themselves in the process.  Like I said, this week was a hard week, for a number of reasons, and then  Saturday and Sunday happened.

Please know that there was nothing magical about Saturday or Sunday.  They were ordinary days that occur when you have had a rough week.  However, Saturday evening during a much needed time of "venting" to each other, something was said that made me pause and think about marriage and this question I saw on Facebook.  It wasn't a magical formula for making marriage work.  It was a simple statement:

Tomorrow is a new day.  It's also Sunday and the beginning of the week.  Let's put this week behind us and CHOOSE to be happy.

And with that statement, the week changed.  We had something to look forward to.  We had a plan of action, we could CHOOSE.  On Sunday we headed to church, First Baptist here in Lake Wales, and were met with the second equation to our issue; our pastor has started a new ten week session on living in a Choice Marriage.  The message was simple and straight forward.  It was also exactly what we needed to hear, being in a marriage and staying married is our choice.

You see, aside from abuse and infidelity and I am not going to broach these issues, being married is my choice.  I have the ability to wake up and say YES, I choose to love my husband today.  I also have the ability to wake up and and choose to find reasons to say NO to loving my husband. For me, it is my choice, and this is the secret of our marriage.

Every day being married I have to make a choice.   I can choose to find fault with what I see as his short comings or I can choose to show him mercy.  I can choose to fight him in every little thing and show all the ways that I am RIGHT, or I can choose to compromise.  I can choose to make him my entire world and forsake everyone and everything else, or I can make him who he is, my husband given to me by God.  I can choose to hold him to a higher standard than I am willing to hold myself to, or I can choose to show him grace when he stumbles.  I can choose to make him my god, or I can choose to see him through the eye's of God.  No matter what I do this day, it is my choice.

Everyday of my marriage, I have the power to stay or go. This power is seen in the choices that I make.  Am I perfect?  Far from it!!   Like Paul stated, I am chief among sinners, especially sinful wives!  But the reminder that we have to choose to love each other dramatically shifted our perspective.  Are we still in the same situation?  YES!  Are we still stuck in what we see as problems?  YES!  BUT, none of that matters!  Today we have made the choice to stay married.  We have made the choice to talk to each other, to affirm each other, to purpose to be together to reconnect weekly on a date, and to purpose to have a weekend or two away for just us.   For us, keeping his and her closets all comes back to the choices we make, and today we chose each other.

Our weekend away this past February.

So, how did our week end?  This Sunday afternoon, we made the choice to sit and talk about the things that were really bothering us.  In that time we saw that there are a lot of things that we need to work on in our marriage.  We need to be more intentional about choosing to love each other, affirming each other, and staying connected.   We also realized that after 17.5 years of marriage, after 21 years of being together as a couple; we still choose each other. 

 Choosing each other, choosing our life together complete with warts and all, is what makes our his and her closets beautiful.