Want a Strong Marriage? Fight For it.

Our Keepsake Journal is Here! 🎉

I cry almost every day he is not home. He is off doing the right thing, and here I sit, walk, shop, swim in the benefit of it. I miss him. We got married to have and to hold, to be together, but this is marriage.

Life. So much happens. As much as I would wish my life to be a cinema-worthy romance reel of sunset outtakes with our song playing in the background, that is not life. Marriage isn’t the fade after she jumps into his arms and we know they’ll be together forever as the credits roll.

Marriage is the hard stuff. It’s the best stuff, but it isn’t a highlight reel.

It’s going to work and grocery shopping and cooking dinner and cleaning it up.

RELATED: Can I Let You in On a Secret? This is Real Love.

It’s deciding where the kids will go to school and which insurance plan to get this year and getting the oil changed in the cars.

It’s budgeting and paying for college and wondering if we will have time to go on an anniversary date.

It’s nights awake with children lying in hospital beds.

It’s laundry and folding his socks and rubbing each other’s shoulders.

It’s watching the eyes of the one you love grow tired and his hair grow silver.

It’s stolen moments when the kids leave the room and sometimes when they don’t.

It’s still wanting to touch when you fall asleep at night.

RELATED: Want a Better Marriage? Get a Hot Tub.

This is marriage if we are lucky.

Lucky? No. If we fight for it.

You want a 10-year marriage? Fight for it.

You want a 20-year marriage? Fight for it.

50, 60, 70 years? Never. Stop. Fighting.

When we see a couple, lines on their faces, age-spotted hands with fingers intertwined, feet slowly shuffling toward one another still, they know what we don’t. They fought to get there.

RELATED: Dear Husband, I Am With You Even When It’s Hard

Don’t you see? Marriage isn’t great because it sits through time like water growing algae in a stagnant pond. It is great because it flowed like a river, broad and swift, then suddenly slower, more of a trickle, dividing around rocks, crashing through the rapids, then back together again before going over the falls and settling gracefully below. Still. Flowing together, staying together, moving on together.

This is marriage.

Marriage takes work. Thankfully, there’s an app that can help! Lasting—the nation’s #1 relationship counseling app—provides accessible sessions designed to help you build a healthy marriage. Download and take Lasting’s free Relationship Health Assessment.

Recommendations in this post contain affiliate links. Her View From Home may receive a small commission if you choose to purchase.

So God Made a Mother book by Leslie Means

If you liked this, you'll love our book, SO GOD MADE A MOTHER available now!

Order Now

Check out our new Keepsake Companion Journal that pairs with our So God Made a Mother book!

Order Now

So God Made a Mother's Story Keepsake Journal

Her View Shop

Hollie Gilman

Hollie Gilman is a freelance writer who has spent the last 21 years momming, homeschooling her three almost-grown-and-flown children, and working with her husband of 24 years. She is a lifelong passionate learner in all things faith, health, and leadership. Right now she is loving her new life in the country (being a pretend farmer) just outside her hometown of Richmond, VA. She occasionally spills her guts on her blog https://www.holliegilman.com/.

Dear Husband, I Choose You Every Day for the Rest of Our Lives

In: Marriage

We renewed our vows yesterday. Not with a big party in front of all our family and friends. I didn’t put on a white dress, there was no tux, and we didn’t pay for a hall or buy a new wedding band. We renewed our vows in front of a sink full of dirty dishes, with the washer and dryer going, just the two of us, under a sign that says “in this kitchen we dance.” Our kids were bickering in the background, and we looked at each other with “how did we get here?” in our eyes. But then...

Keep Reading

Some Days We’re Strangers, Some Days We’re Stronger

In: Marriage

Some days we’re strangers. Some days we’re stronger. It’s a feeling I’ve stumbled across in my marriage, particularly after we became parents. Some days, I look across the room and see a superhero. Other days, it feels like I’m looking at someone I barely recognize. I often look in the mirror and say the exact same things about myself. Every day tells a different story. We are faced with different versions of ourselves as parents . . . and partners. It may sound harsh, but it’s the honest truth. I also know I wouldn’t trade a moment of either day...

Keep Reading

To the Military Spouses Making it Work

In: Living, Marriage, Motherhood

Military spouses hug with child hugging legs

Last night, after I’d read the first half of the same two board books over and over to the twins and settled them in their cribs, I laced up my running shoes and ran out into the hot night. Dusk was collecting beneath the blackberry bushes and clusters of fireflies were testing their flashers in the tree line. Even the breeze, frothing up the treetops, felt like the opening of an oven on my face. I made it all the way around the lake before the path disappeared in the dark. David had just finished reading Little House on the...

Keep Reading

You Make Our Marriage Work and I Love You More than Ever

In: Faith, Marriage

Husband and wife, smiling, selfie, color photo

I used to write love letters to you. I’d sit in my dorm room for hours, penning pages of poems that you’ve apparently kept in a drawer in our bedroom closet ever since. Recently, you mentioned you miss that girl. We laughed because neither of us knew you would turn out to be the sentimental one. And I was thinking, but never said, that the older, more cynical version of me has no idea how to write a love poem anymore. I look at love differently now. I’m different now. We’ve waded through years of never-before-known territory—sometimes treacherous, often mundane,...

Keep Reading

This Middle Love

In: Marriage

Husband and wife standing in stone courtyard, black-and-white photo

I look at you, and I can’t really remember our beginning anymore. That exciting, bubbly feeling that accompanied our firsts in everything has faded to a consistent and faithful hum. Here now, in the weeds of life—the thick of parenting, the building of our life stage—all the years of struggling to make it. Here we are, often so tired, but still trying- sometimes searching for the excitement of how it used to be. This middle of our love—a little bit worn with the years, but somehow stronger than it was when it began. A little like our favourite blanket, no...

Keep Reading

The Only Fights I Regret Are the Ones We Never Had

In: Living, Marriage

You packed up your things and left last night. There are details to work out and lawyers to call, but the first step in a new journey has started. I feel equal parts sad, angry, scared, and relieved. There’s nothing left to fix. There’s no reconciliation to pursue. And I’m left thinking about the fights we never had. I came down the stairs today and adjusted the thermostat to a comfortable temperature for me. It’s a fight I didn’t consider worth having before even though I was the one living in the home 24 hours a day while you were...

Keep Reading

He’s Not the Man I Married, but I Love the Man He’s Become

In: Marriage

There is a long-standing joke in our family about my first husband. It goes something like this, “My first husband never watched football.” This is said on the rare occasion when my guy decides to sit down and watch a college football game. We both laugh because neither of us has been married more than once. Instead, this joke is aimed at all the ways we have changed over the years of being together. We married very young—I was 15 and he was just a week past his 17th birthday. Life was difficult with both of us still in high...

Keep Reading

Thank You for This Sacrificial Love

In: Marriage

To lay down one’s life, according to the Bible, is the greatest expression of love. Jesus laid down His life for us by dying on the cross. God loves us so much that He sent His only son to die for humanity. As Jesus laid down his life for us, so Scripture commands husbands to lay down their lives for their wives. It’s a heavy responsibility placed on the husband to die to himself, to his desires, to his flesh, to love and serve his wife. A husband ought to love sacrificially, and that is exactly the man I married....

Keep Reading

I Hope Heaven Looks like 3128 Harper Road

In: Grief, Living, Loss, Marriage

Husband and wife, posed older color photo

Jeannine Ann Eddings Morris grew up in western Kentucky as the oldest daughter of hard-working parents, who both worked at the Merritt Clothing factory. Jeannine was the oldest of 23 grandchildren who proudly belonged to John B. and Celeste Hardeman. John B. was a well-known preacher who traveled all over the South to share the gospel. Life as a child was as humble as one might expect for the 1940s. Jeannine was the oldest of four children, spanning a 13-year age range. To hear her talk, her childhood and teenage memories consisted of mostly reading every book she could find...

Keep Reading

Overcoming Conflict Builds a Marriage that Lasts

In: Marriage

Couple sitting together on couch, color photo

I would never have admitted to being afraid of conflict back then. Not in my marriage anyway. I’d read all the books about how marriage is hard work and conflict is normal and I knew we were definitely the exception. But then at some point that first year, I realized two things: we were not the world’s most exceptional couple after all, and I was, indeed, afraid of conflict. If we argued, even after I’d apologized a million times, I was very afraid I had failed. Like I had torn a little piece off our marriage that couldn’t ever go back. So...

Keep Reading

Jesus is At the Center of it All

Faith

Jesus is At the Center of it All

CNN and Sesame Street Will Host a "Town Hall" to Help Kids and Families Discuss Racism

Kids

Want a Strong Marriage? Fight For it.

Marriage is the hard stuff. It’s the best stuff, but it isn’t a highlight reel.

You want a 10-year marriage? Fight for it.

If you liked this, you'll love our book, SO GOD MADE A MOTHER available now!

Check out our new Keepsake Companion Journal that pairs with our So God Made a Mother book!

Her View Shop

Dear Husband, I Choose You Every Day for the Rest of Our Lives

Some Days We’re Strangers, Some Days We’re Stronger

To the Military Spouses Making it Work

You Make Our Marriage Work and I Love You More than Ever

This Middle Love

The Only Fights I Regret Are the Ones We Never Had

He’s Not the Man I Married, but I Love the Man He’s Become

Thank You for This Sacrificial Love

I Hope Heaven Looks like 3128 Harper Road

Overcoming Conflict Builds a Marriage that Lasts

Previous Post

Next Post

You May Also Like