10 Things Learned in 10 Years of Marriage

Ten years of marriage feels like both a long and a short time. As we prepared to celebrate our first decade of marriage today, we sat down to reflect on some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it summarizes some of the main things we have learned.

We realize that our readers come from various places in life – some are married, some unmarried, some are struggling with their marriages, some are divorced or separated. Our intention for sharing is to give a glimpse into our relationship and hopefully bring encouragement or invite pondering. We recognize that the marriage we have can only be described as an unmerited gift – an act of grace in our lives. We are fortunate to have supportive family and friends around us and are grateful for their roles in shaping us as individuals so that we could have the marriage that we do.

Three years ago, we wrote 7 Things Learned in 7 Years of Marriage. This year, we’ve created a new list with 10 Things Learned in 10 Years of Marriage:

1) Be Demanding of My Wife’s Attention (Tim)

Olive is a generous person. One of the ways she shows her generosity is by creating art and giving it away. In the past few years she’s created paintings to celebrate birthdays, engagements, and births; to encourage people going through a difficult divorce, fighting cancer, and mourning the loss of a child. Every time she finished, I would admire the beautiful artwork. We would hang it in our home to enjoy for a few days and then it would be given away.

Then I started getting jealous. Why was Olive giving away all of the art? Why couldn’t we keep any of it? Why didn’t she give any to me? But I felt selfish thinking this way – Olive loved being generous and surprising dear friends and family with her art. So I kept these feelings to myself, not wanting to ruin Olive’s joy.

After months and months, the feeling of jealousy grew with each painting that was given away. Finally I couldn’t keep it in any longer and shared my feelings with Olive. I asked if she could paint something for me, something that I could keep and not give away.

So for my 36^th birthday, she painted me the biggest painting she had done in years. It was bigger than anything she had given to anyone else – an enormous 4 foot by 3 foot canvas of the Oregon Coast. And it took her longer to paint than anything else she’s given to others. My heart swelled with joy as I watched her work on this painting.

Through this experience I learned the importance of being demanding of my wife’s attention. There are so many demands on my wife – from my kids, our family, our friends, and our community. Everyone wants her to do something. Sometimes I feel forgotten. Sometimes I feel left out. That’s when I need to speak up and share my feelings. That’s when it’s healthy to show my jealously.

In our marriage it’s critical that we are each other’s most important person. I need to know that Olive treasures me above everyone else, and she needs to know the same about me. And when we don’t feel that way, we need to speak up.

The painting now hangs above our mantel and is a daily reminder to us to keep each other first.

2) Small Things Can Matter a Lot (Olive)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had dry skin. This has meant that I need to moisturize after every shower. Coupled with my sensitivity to scents (hello HSP trait), I am quite picky about what I use. After trying a myriad of different lotions and creams, I eventually settled on a particular scent of body butter from a particular store. I usually had enough on hand to last me a while, but I was beginning to run out of it. I casually mentioned this at some point to Tim while diligently checking for sales online.

Then, out of the blue while I was working at home one afternoon, I received a text from Tim. “Is this the scent of body butter you use?” He was waiting to pick up his dad from the airport and was passing time at the mall. “There are 3 of them left. They’re 50% off.” Yes, please! I answered him back.

I was amazed that Tim a) knew the type of body butter I used, b) paid attention to the fact that I was running low on it, and c) thought to get it for me when he was at the mall. Those little containers of body butter became more than moisture for my skin; they communicated to me that Tim loved me because he cared about what concerned me.

I think it’s easy over time to stop paying attention to these little things; to overlook these small ways of communicating care to each other. Maybe that’s why, ten years in, Tim’s gesture of kindness meant all the more.

3) Knowing Tim’s Acceptance of Me Has Helped Me Accept Myself (Olive)

After we had our second daughter, I went through a time of postpartum depression. I felt weak and alone in the darkness, ashamed that I couldn’t be more “there” for my family. I came home one day to find a card on my desk. Tim had taken a piece of dark blue paper and drawn a picture of the backs of two figures looking up at the sky, which had a few stars. Underneath, he had written, “I will wait with you for the sun to rise.”

His solidarity during my dark time was a lifeline for me. We did wait together for the sun to rise. And thankfully, the sun did eventually rise.

Knowing that Tim is on my side and that he accepts me has helped me face the parts of me that I’d rather run away from. Whether it be postpartum depression, my tendency to get upset when losing a board game, struggling with my post-baby body, or quirks I find embarrassing about myself, having his support, love, and acceptance has given me courage to accept both the light and shadow sides of myself. This has been one of the best gifts Tim has given me.

4) Save Our Fights for When We have Time and Energy (Tim)

One thing Olive and I have fought over several times is related to car seats. She wanted our kids to be rear facing for longer because it was safer. I wanted to turn them forward so they could see and (hopefully) not cry so much in the car.

A few years ago when our younger daughter was 13 or 14 months old, Olive was headed out of the house using my parent’s car. I had installed the car seat facing forward and when she saw this she got upset at me. We started an argument, but I knew we did not have the time or energy to have a proper fight since Olive needed to leave right away. So we both restrained ourselves and said that we would finish this fight later.

A few evenings later after the kids had been put to bed, we continued our argument. We discovered that without the heated emotions of the moment and having both the luxury of time and energy, our “fight” ended up being a regular discussion. We shared our point of view and listened well to each other. After we both felt heard, we then came to an agreement that was best for our daughter and for each of us.

We’ve learned that fighting well is necessary to keep our marriage healthy, and to fight well, we both needed time and energy.

5) The Importance of Nurturing Our Friendship (Olive)

Before we got married, our mentors and pre-marital counsellors, Neal and June Black (who work with FamilyLife Canada, helping many couples strengthen their marriages) gave us this piece of advice: “Make sure you keep building your friendship. Because you can work diligently on your communication and end up communicating very effectively how much you don’t like each other.” That has stuck with us.

We want to keep liking each other so we have been intentional about making sure we have fun together. Recently, we “spent” our babysitting (oh those precious, precious hours) watching Crazy Rich Asians in the theatre and attending the play, Kim’s Convenience. It would be easy to keep our babysitting for more practical things like doctor’s appointments, working more, or parent-teacher conferences, but we have learned that we need to do these fun things to continue cultivating our friendship with each other.

Finding ways to laugh together and build positive memories fills our emotional banks so that when we come across conflicts, we have capacity to face the harder emotions without bankrupting our relationship.

6) Develop Life-Giving Habits for Our Marriage (Tim)

In “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, he talks about the importance of habits in the success of people: “Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”

In the same way, we’ve learned that developing good habits or routines in our marriage has helped keep it healthy and growing.

Here are a few habits we keep:

• Annual Blue Day – Once a year Olive and I go away for a day to reflect on the past year, and to dream, vision, and plan the coming year and years.
• Weekly Date Night – Friday is date night where we spend time together watching TV or a movie, chatting, or going out (when we have the luxury of a babysitter). It’s time to catch up, reconnect, and just enjoy being together.
• Weekly Meeting – Every Sunday after we put the kids to bed we have our weekly meeting, where we go through the week’s plans and discuss school pickups/drop-offs, meals, work schedules, meetings, and activities.
• Daily “Good Parts, Hard Parts” – This year we started doing this practice with our kids during bedtime – we all think about and share the good parts and hard parts of our day. It’s a chance to hear about the life-giving and life-draining things that happened.
• Regular Connection – Most evenings we chat while we have an evening snack, get ready for bed, and lie in bed together – it’s allows us to connect emotionally. Physical connection is also important and we make sure to keep a healthy dose of that too.

7) It’s Easy to Forget Our Vows (But Important to Remember Them) (Olive)

For our wedding day, we memorized the vows we wrote together. Every year on our anniversary, we make a point to renew them. We stand face to face, hold each other’s hands, look each other in the eyes, and try to recite those vows. Every year we fail to remember what our promises are. Every anniversary, we inevitably end up reading off of the picture frame with our handwritten vows that hangs in our home.

To me, revisiting our vows every year has been important. The words that we wrote down to begin our marriage contain a vision of what our marriage is about. As I speak them to Tim year after year, I have an opportunity to ask myself whether I still agree with this vision and whether I am living toward this vision. Part of our vows read, “In the presence of God, our family, and friends, I choose to love and respect you, pray for you, be your place of rest, inspire you to pursue life, grow with you, and work with you to make our marriage one that is marked by grace, gratitude, and blessing to others.” I ask myself, “Am I still choosing to love Tim? Respect Tim? Pray for Tim?” and “Is our marriage marked more and more by grace, gratitude, and blessing to others?”

In reviewing our vows, I’m reminded of what I’m choosing. That marriage isn’t just something I entered ten years ago, but that I’m currently still an active participant in it.

8) Pay Attention to the Changes in My Wife (Tim)

A divorced man once wrote that his wife was not the same person that he married. When I first read it, it confused me how this could be. But after being married a few years, I could see how easily this could happen.

One time, after Olive came home from a women’s conference, she shared how small she felt her life was. She had met people at the conference that seemed to be doing big things around the world, and was reflecting about her desire to be a part of something larger. This was the first time I’d heard her express this and it surprised me at the time.

Over the years, I’ve realized that my wife is constantly changing. Every day as she reads a new book, has a conversation with a friend or stranger, or experiences something new, she changes. And if I’m not paying attention, I’ll miss the changes that are happening. If I miss enough changes, one day I’ll wake up wondering why my wife is so different than the person I married.

So I make sure that I remain curious about my wife. Each day I make it a game and do some detective work to discover what has changed about my wife recently.

9) Giving Each Other Space To Be (Olive)

When we were first married, there seemed to be an unspoken movement toward togetherness and oneness. We each set aside ourselves so to speak for the sake of our marriage and union. I think that was an important step in the journey because we were so used to living our separate lives.

Over time, however, as the oneness established and deepened, we began seeing the value of giving each other space to be. Not giving it reluctantly, but with joy and almost a protectiveness for the other person. We have both taken personal retreats and trips ranging from a few days to a week long (even and especially after we had kids). When I was dealing with postpartum depression, Tim sent me off to my friend’s house to sleep for a few nights. Recently, while we were on family vacation, Tim brought his journal into one of the rooms but the kids kept trying to interact with him. I shooed the kids out of the room and closed the door, telling them to leave their dad alone so he could write.

In the mornings, Tim usually wakes with the kids and feeds them breakfast so that I can ease into the day. To be fair, every few months, I muster up the resolve to give him a break from wake-up duty. That usually results in such grumpiness from my end that he resumes taking care of the morning routine the following day, but I still do it because I know everyone needs a sleep-in day now and then.

As the years have passed, we have also relaxed on our need to change the other person. We have come to accept each other better. For example, although I don’t understand why he MUST have evaporated milk in his tea, I now buy that stuff by the case. On the flip side, he has come to accept that I cannot live without fresh flowers in the house – even if it means getting bouquets while on vacation.

As our relationship has deepened, we have grown more secure in ourselves and with each other. This has opened the way for us to release each other to be fully who we are.

10) Serve Beyond What is Fair (Tim)

Often Olive and I serve each other “fairly.” On a Saturday with no commitments we will take turns watching the kids so the other can do their own thing. She watches the kids in the morning while I go clothes shopping or watch a movie, and I take the kids out in the afternoon while Olive naps, paints, or writes. Each year we each take a personal retreat while the other holds down the fort. Being fair seems like the reasonable thing to do.

But here’s the problem with serving each other evenly: I know 100% of the work that I do, but I never see all the work that Olive does. So if we technically served each other evenly, it will always seem to me that I have done more work. Things will seem unfair to me and I might do less. Then Olive might respond similarly. And soon, we are both resenting the other because things are unfair.

For our marriage to thrive, I have to give beyond what is fair. I must have a servant heart and put the needs of my wife above my own. Of course that’s easier said than done. The problem is that I am self-centered. As Tim Keller writes, “Self-centeredness is a havoc-wreaking problem in many marriages, and it is the ever-present enemy in every marriage.”

I’ve found that the only way to serve beyond what is fair in a sustained way is to rely on strength that comes from God’s love. During the times when I do not feel loved or served enough by my wife, I can still generously love and serve her, because God loves and serves me first.

In the same way there are times that I am completely self-absorbed and only have capacity to think of my own interest (like when I went through depression or when I have a man-cold), and I know that I am not serving Olive well. Yet, she somehow finds the strength to love me and to serve me, beyond what is fair and much more than what I deserve. For her that is only possible because she knows the deep love and grace of God.