Ecxpectations–they get us every time.

We are given these incredible imaginations that love to run wild. One of the things we imagine from a young age is our future spouse. For me, I had imagined a man who showered me with verbal affection. He wouldn’t say or do any of the “wrong things,” and he’d be 100 percent available whenever his family needed him. We would travel the world together and he would want to be a stay-at-home dad while I built a career. There wouldn’t be a lot of grace in our marriage because we wouldn’t need it.

This was my right person.

My husband had made a list of what he wanted in a wife before he met me. She would cook him homemade meals like his mama did and pamper him after he got home from work. Together, they would flip old, outdated homes and give them a second chance. In the evenings, you could expect to find her out in the garden getting her hands dirty alongside him.

This was his right person.

You might have guessed by now that my husband didn’t meet my expectations, and I was far from meeting his. So according to that, we married the wrong people.

We figured this out early on when we felt disappointed by each other’s complexities.

Marriage is hard. Two beings are put together who barely know or love themselves and are expected to know and love each other. Not only that, but we morph and change over time as we experience life. The people we were at the beginning of our marriage are very different than who we are now. It’s like falling in love with the same shell but different insides every couple of years–sometimes we like the changes and other times we miss the old version.

No matter what, we have to expect to marry the wrong person because the right person doesn’t exist. When we first discover this, we feel defeated or misled, so we want to walk away. We did it wrong this time, but there’s still a chance he/she is out there, right?

Instead of walking away from your marriage, I challenge you to walk away from your expectations. Sure, there are some expectations that shouldn’t be compromised (hint: your wedding vows), but there are many assumptions that we need to let go.

Of course, we want to go into a marriage feeling hopeful, and we have every right to share our expectations with one another. But marriage is about outserving each other. It’s about working hard making compromises instead of working hard to change each other.

We say we seek happiness, but I want to say it goes deeper than that; we want acceptance. We want to know that even if we don’t ever change the little annoying, imperfect things about ourselves, we will be loved.

God has never told us there is a “right person” for each of us. Instead, He tells us how to love the one we choose.

Originally published on the author’s blog