Choosing Marriage: Why It Has to Start with We>Me

by Debra K. Fileta

Marriage will cost you. In big ways and in small ways.

Even though marriage is one of the most significant choices you will make in life, it’s the only one you’re given a license to do before you’ve actually learned how to do it!

They go into marriage with the goal of what marriage will do for them, rather than what they will do for their marriage.

marriage is not simply about your happiness. It’s not even about you. It’s about unconditional love, which we choose to give time and time again. It’s about sacrificing, serving, giving, and forgiving, and then doing it over again.

When the cost of marriage becomes too great, we convince ourselves we have nothing left to gain, and therefore nothing left to give.

Marriage is work, but working on your marriage is the best work you will ever do.

marriage makes you better.

Real marriage is not about being happy and fulfilled for the rest of our lives; it’s about the two of us becoming the best we can be from this day forward. Proverbs 27:17 teaches that “as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

Through the un-replicated commitment and intimacy of marriage, we have the opportunity for lifelong growth and maturity, practicing selflessness, forgiveness, and grace as we learn to love each other unconditionally. Two imperfect human beings exposing their realness, yet loving each other still.

Marriage isn’t just about becoming happier; it’s about becoming better. But ironically, in becoming better, we often find that we’ve also become happier.

Feelings come, and feelings go, and those who build the foundation of their marriage on how they feel will eventually find their marriage crumbling.

It’s easy to follow our hearts, but it takes real courage to lead our hearts.

marriage, another human being is facing us at all times, exposing both our strengths and our struggles just by their presence. And at times, that can cause friction. But that very same friction is what files down our rough edges, forcing us to see the blemishes of our lives and take responsibility for what we need to change.

I am a hundred times better than the person I was when I got married because I have been sharpened and refined by the discipline of learning to take responsibility.

Marriage has the potential of being the deepest and most fulfilling relationship you will ever experience on the face of this earth.

A good marriage comes from a series of decisions over an extended period of time, with the commitment of two people choosing to love each other no matter what may come their way.

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away.

True selflessness is about loving others well, but the vicious truth is that we can’t love others well until we’ve learned to value and respect ourselves.

Selflessness does not mean ignoring your needs or keeping them to yourself. It doesn’t mean staying silent and expecting others to know what you want or need. And it doesn’t mean holding back, particularly when speaking up could be beneficial to your personal health and the health of your relationship.

Put your spouse’s needs and wants before your own. Choosing selflessness in marriage requires that we learn to recognize our spouse’s desires and then go out of our way to fulfill those desires to the best of our ability.

when two empty people try to engage in marriage, they end up feeling frustrated, disappointed, and hurt when the other person can’t give them what they need.

The Enemy is on high alert because he sees the potential our marriages have to become great.

God wants to strengthen us for the unseen spiritual and emotional battles we will face in marriage, but the only way we can prepare is by exchanging our emptiness for God’s fullness.

Simply put, our relationship with Jesus is the one and only relationship that can fill up our wells to the point of overflowing.

We all come to relationships with walls—barriers we possess in need of being broken or taken down.

Many individuals go years, or even the entirety of their lives, without ever recognizing that they have walls in need of fixing, barriers that have been slowly erected around their hearts one brick at a time.

Some of the healthy defense mechanisms commonly referred to in counseling and psychology are forgiveness, altruism, acceptance, mercy, moderation, patience, emotional-regulation, gratitude, respect, and humility.

Unhealthy defense mechanisms are ways of interacting and behaving that are damaging to our relationships, such as isolation, denial, withdrawal, invalidation, displacement, fantasy, and passive aggression.

Once we share our emotions with someone outside our marriage, we have less of a need to share them within our marriage. So the more we vent to others, the less we find ourselves desiring or needing to share our hearts with our spouse. Beware of innocently building a wall of isolation between you and your spouse.

isolation is failing to share our emotions with our spouse,

denial is when we fail to take responsibility within the context of our conflict.

The wall of withdrawal is the tendency to run away instead of deal with the issues that need to be dealt with. It’s that “fight or flee” mentality when we’re faced with a difficult situation and have to make a decision on how we’ll handle it.

The more you understand about your walls, the faster you’ll be able to recognize them and then let them down in exchange for intimacy.

The wall of invalidation is when we fail to recognize, acknowledge, speak out, or communicate the good things in the people around us.

Invalidation occurs when we repress the positive things and instead convey the negative things. But it can also happen when we choose to say nothing at all.

Fantasy simply means anything we use to escape from the reality of life.

We’ve become so good at exchanging the intimate for the inanimate, the real-life connections for something (or someone) that’s fake. Beware of the wall of fantasy, because it often creeps in and takes over in such a subtle and unrecognizable way.

the wall of passive-aggression: the inability or unwillingness to say what you mean in a respectful way. Oftentimes people are wired to be either passive (not saying anything) or aggressive (disrespectfully saying what they need) in their communication styles.

Anger is the negative feeling that accompanies this wall. In and of itself, anger is not bad—it’s simply a sign that something is going on that needs to be dealt with or expressed.

The Bible reminds us that even in our anger, we’re still responsible for making good choices and expressing our anger in a way that avoids sin (Ephesians 4:26).

rage is the negative actions and choices of that anger: the yelling, cursing, screaming, and flying off the handle. Rage is that great big, bad lion inside of us that comes out to roar when we’ve lost all self-control.

Whether or not we realize it, we rage to protect ourselves from getting hurt even more because rage keeps people out.

Vulnerability is the only thing that can begin to tear down the walls we’ve erected around our hearts and teach us what it means to experience true intimacy.

To stay connected, two people must be deliberate about moving toward each other, or they’ll find themselves slowly drifting.

Every conversation has a different level of depth, intimacy, and connection based on the content of what’s being discussed.

The more we’re filled up with Christ, the more He’ll begin seeping into our conversations.

carve out a 20- to 30-minute chunk of time at least once a week to sit down and connect with no distractions.

Use this time to discuss the positive things in your marriage, to encourage and build up each other, and to share your lives and hearts.

years later, you won’t always remember what you fought about, but you will always remember how you fought about it. Take that little nugget of truth and put it in your pocket. I sure wish I had it back then.

If we were going to argue, we had to learn to argue productively. For starters, we would commit to these rules: 1. Never walk out on the other person. 2. Never leave in the middle of an argument. 3. Always seek a resolution before moving on to the next thing.