On Love and Marriage

"Her husband is awesome" said one coworker to another, speaking of my husband.  "Oh you know him?" replied the other. "No, I just know what she's said of him and he sounds awesome."  

The exchange brought a smile to my face and caused butterflies to flutter in my stomach.  "Yeah, my husband is awesome." In the days since this exchange occurred I began to reflect on how rarely we see people saying positive things, if anything, about their spouse.  I'm far from a perfect wife, I have my crabby days, demanding days, tearful days, and moody days to rival the best of them, but one thing is for sure...I love my husband!

I talk about him constantly, because he is awesome, and the more I talk him up to others, the more in love with him I feel.  But the opposite is also true.  If I talk poorly about him and others commiserate with me I can just as readily cause myself to become discontent. 

Song of Solomon 8:7 says "Many waters cannot quench love, rivers cannot overwhelm it."  What this means to me is that circumstances cannot destroy love.  Two years into our marriage we discovered that we were infertile and began the process of testing and procedures to find a cause and a solution.  The journey was painful in a way I had never experienced pain before and the strain on our relationship was significant.  We have yet to see a natural manifestation of our victory, but still we're stronger, closer, and more in love than ever before; a situation that has destroyed many marriages has caused us to cling more fiercely to each other.

Near the end of 2014, as we were drawing an end to the striving part of our fertility journey and moving into a place of surrender, I threw our wedding DVD into the Xbox and watched our vows.  They drew me to tears in a new way, I realized that they weren't just beautiful words that we spoke on our wedding day, but they were indeed our commitment to each other, words spoken before we had any idea what life would bring to us as a couple.  A commitment, a promise, a pledge.  These are the words the pastor spoke to me as I held and looked onto the hands of my husband:

"Tiffany, please face Evan and hold his hands, palms up, so you may see the gift that they are to you.

These are the hands of your best friend, young and strong and vibrant with love, that are holding yours on your wedding day, as he promises to love you all the days of his life.

These are the hands that will work along side yours, as together you build your future, as you laugh and cry, as you share your innermost secrets and dreams.

These are the hands that will passionately love you and cherish you through the years, for a lifetime of happiness.

These are the hands that will countless times wipe the tears from your eyes; tears of sorrow and tears of joy.

These are the hands that will comfort you in illness, and hold you when fear and grief wrack your mind.

These are the hands that will tenderly lift your chin and brush your cheeks as they raise your face to look into his eyes: eyes that are filled completely with his overwhelming love and desire for you."


My husband is a man of his word and when he commits he means it; he has spent the last 5 years proving it.

During our pre-marriage counseling we were asked to define love.  My definition was this "Love is a commitment to act apart from feeling."  There are days where we certainly don't feel like loving each other and those days are when it is most important to act loving. My grandmother once said "A three strand cord is not easily broken, but it is unwound one move at a time."  The behavior I choose to display toward my husband and the words I choose to speak about my husband directly affect how I feel toward my husband.  The words I choose to speak and the thoughts I allow myself to think can cause me to feel ridiculously in love or quite discontent with my husband. How I feel toward my spouse is far more up to me than it is up to him and only I can affect how I feel.

When Every Move Matters

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.  It is my personal approach that creates the climate.  It is my daily mood that makes the weather.  I possess tremendous power to make life misreable or joyous.  I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.  I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.  In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a situation is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.  If we treat people as they ought to be, we halp them become what they are capable of becoming." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

I first encountered the above quote in early 2010 as a fresh out of college graduate carrying my Bachelor's in Psychology determined to make a difference in the world.  I tucked it away into a folder and forgot about it until 2 years ago.  I was cleaning out a townhouse that I rented with my husband and I found this quote stuffed inside one of my notebooks.  At that time I was working in a school specialized toward children with autism.  These children are highly perceptive to mood, I learned in no time that the mood I was in directly impacted the mood of my students.  If my affect was bright, I could brighten theirs, conversely, if my mood was irritable they would respond with undesirable behaviors and I would struggle to keep them on task.  It was indeed "my response that decide(d) whether a crisis (was) escalated or de-escalated, and a person (was) humanized or de-humanized"  It was my responsibility each day to value these children as individuals and my heart became motivated by their successes.  Whether or not I had a good day was often more up to me than it was up to my students. 

When I left that school and moved on to work with children and adolescents in a mental health setting this quote became even more important to me, except this time the focus was on the last part of it: "If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."  I can't tell you how many times I've encountered a young person trapped in the expectations of others, held captive to mistakes that they've made, begging for someone to help them get to where they want to go instead of holding them to where they are.

See, this concept is much more challenging than treating others as we want to be treated.  This concept is about seeing people as God sees them and then treating them accordingly, deliberately shifting our focus from their problems to their potential.  I'm not saying it's easy,  but few things worth doing ever are.