Reflections on Our Eleventh Anniversary!

Today, Jamie and I celebrate 11 years of being married! I love her so freaking much. Just last week, my marriage came up naturally in a conversation with two of my students and I got emotional (i.e. I teared up in front of them) because I felt so fiercely how much I care about Jamie and how grateful I am to have experienced this journey together.

That said, our marriage wasn’t always so great. The first year was really hard! Let me explain:

First, you need to know that Jamie and I did not officially date very long at all. We had been friends as LDS missionaries and then as emailing buddies (living in different states) for about a year-and-a-half. We finally started to date while hanging out over a Christmas break from our respective universities. We dated four days before getting engaged and then were married four months later.

So, while we had been friends for a while, we didn’t date very long before getting married. I have no regrets about this choice (and there is even research which shows that time spent time is not a predictor of whether a marriage will last or not), it did come with consequences. After we got married, there were surprises. There were plenty of times when I thought that I didn’t sign up for being married to this or that aspect of my new wife.

On top of that, my personality loves possibility! And when my possibilities get limited, I often struggle with feeling confined. Making choices is hard for me because rather than focus on the good that comes from my choice, I tend to worry about missing out on all the possibilities that would have come with the other choices I could have made. This tendency was a real problem for enjoying the first year of marriage. Rather than focus on the goodness of choosing to marry Jamie, I often worried about how I was stuck with one choice and wondered about how the possibilities of marrying other people were now limited.

(BTW, I’m not proud that I felt this way. I feel very vulnerable sharing that truth but I think it is good to be vulnerable and I hope sharing this will help others.)

So, I spent the first year of marriage unhappy in many ways. You need not suppose that I was unhappy all the time. Jamie and I had lots of great experiences and growth together but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the concerns listed above continually bothered me and put a shadow over the first year of marriage.

I kept at marriage though simply because I believe in marriage. I believe that marriage is not just a legal contract but a covenant with God to stay with and love and honor my wife. So, out of love for God, I kept at the marriage in spite of my concerns. Then, some time into my second year of marriage, I had an important experience.

I decided I didn’t want to be unhappy in marriage anymore. I wanted to figure out a resolution for the doubts I was having. So, I began reading The Book of Mormon from beginning to end and highlighting every verse that taught me anything that could help me figure this out. One morning, I was reading in the book (I don’t remember where to be honest) and a thought hit me like lighting. It went something like this:

You didn’t get married to make yourself happy. You got married to make her happy.

That thought was the first marriage breakthrough and changed everything. It enabled me to forget about all the other possibilities and could have pursued, fully embrace my choice to marry Jamie, and dedicate myself to making her happy, not worrying about my own happiness. That day, I chose to change my perspective and look for ways to increase her happiness. Of course, I haven’t been perfect at always being unselfish ever since but I have worked hard to focus on putting her wants and needs before my own and really honoring the covenant I made at marriage to dedicate my life to Jamie’s happiness.

As I’ve followed through on those intentions over the ten-ish years since that breakthrough, I’ve discovered a profound, sublime, quiet satisfaction and joy in marriage. I love being married to Jamie so much and love her so much not so much because of any one moment but because I’ve made so many little sacrifices for her over the years.

Now, I must say here that I am lucky and blessed to have married someone who does not at all take advantage of my decision to put her before myself. She reciprocates it. I don’t think this principle works unless both partners in the relationship are trying to apply it. If one person is perpetually forgetting themselves to dedicate their actions to the other’s happiness and the other person never does so, it can become one sided and even abusive. This goes back to a blog post I wrote recently about the role of loving oneself which you can read by clicking here.

But in a situation where both partners forget themselves in service to the other person, trusting that the other person will serve them back, real unity and sublime joy grow. It is a wonderful thing I recommend to all. And I never would have discovered it had not my reverence for the principle of marriage moved me to stick with it through that hard year. I know many people who don’t like the idea of marriage for various reasons but I am so grateful for a covenant that moves people to stay together and figure things out so that can get through hard stuff and discover unspeakable joy at the end of the tunnel.