An Unbreakable Marriage

Photography by: Laura Sutton Photography

"Get married," they said.

"It will be fun," they said.

Okay, so actually, no one said that but we got married anyway, and here we are almost seven years into it.

The photo on the cover of this blog post is one of our more recent family photos. You might take a quick look and see a happy, couple with two adorable kids, but what the image doesn't show is that only a few hours before, we were scrambling around the house, running late, fighting about what to wear, and the mood in the house was anything but happy.

I'm not saying it's always like that, but it's also not always rainbows and butterflies, yet so often we feel obligated to put on this act so people believe that it is.

Marriage has certainly been a journey, and yes, we definitely love each other.

Many days though, we struggle to like each other.

Can anyone relate?

Okay, maybe it's just us, and if that's the case, then we really do have a lot of work to do, but something tells me it's not.

So often, marriage is the goal that it seems everyone is trying to achieve. So many people stress out about it and are in a hurry to find a spouse, only to reach that coveted life they've been dreaming of and wonder...

"Did I pick the wrong one? What's the return policy?"

We see couples on social media so in love that it makes us want to puke, and then we wonder,

"Why dont I have even half of that?"

Everyone is so quick to post lovey-dovey pictures, and talk about how their spouse surprises them and how "it's the little things," but rarely are we seeing the struggles, and this comparison game is completely suffocating to our own relationships.

People hate sharing their struggles because heaven forbid, they admit they are human and show areas of weakness.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that social media should be a diary, or that everyone should be posting about their baby mama drama, and throwing their spouse under the bus by sharing intimate details of their fights for the world to see, but why don't people talk about how hard it is...like at all?

If the happy and in love people are truly happy, why arent they sharing their secrets?

Do they enjoy seeing us struggle with mediocre marriages at best?

I hate to say it, but I struggle to believe that anyone has a true Nicolas Sparks love story. I mean, I know that there are some amazing marriages out there, but even those ones have to have their rough moments. At some point or another, every wife is annoyed that her husband leaves his beard hair in the sink right after she just cleaned the bathroom. Every husband rolls his eyes about the fact that his wife feels unloved because he tried to fix her problems rather than just listening to her vent. There's laundrey left on the floor. Someone's farts stink up the bedroom. He doesn't floss enough, and she nags too much...

We can't be the only ones who have gotten into a fight that started with a critical comment of loud chewing and spiraled into much, much more and then ended with someone slamming doors and peeling out of the driveway.

Please don't tell us we are the only ones.

Listen, we aren't naive enough to believe that there is a final destination here. We know that there isn't some secret formula that we have to uncover to never see the days of annoyance again. We know it's always going to be work.

But it can also be better.

So we are going to talk about all of it. The bad days, the good days, our flaws, and our strengths. We want to admit that we face these embarrassing hardships because it's scary to think that there are newlyweds somewhere out there who are struggling, and they could be considering divorce because it's not as easy as everyone made it look.

Corey and I love each other...a lot.

But we also go to bed mad sometimes. We also go days without talking sometimes whether it be due to a fight or mere chaos in our schedule. We also look at each other sometimes and think...

"Meh."

Just being completely honest.

We have a lot of work to do on this union of ours.

I don't think that's anything radical that makes us failures, either. We want to get better every single day, and we want to talk about how we are doing it because we are finding that people either don't talk about it at all, or they wait to talk about it until they have figured it all out.

What good is that?

If there's one thing that we are sure of, it's that we're in this for the long haul. For better or for worse, till death do us part...forever. So why not make it more enjoyable?

We can't promise this journey is going to pretty.
We can't even promise it's going to be fun.
But we can promise that we are working on it,
And we can promise that we aren't giving up.

Not now. Not ever. No matter what.

Join us, because you deserve transparency and hope for a better marriage too.