This summer, my husband and I will celebrate our first anniversary, but this isn’t going to be one of those stories telling you the 10 things I learned in my first year. I don’t have five things I’d do differently or three lessons to share with you.
Because the most important part of our first year of marriage, and the best piece of advice I can offer a newlywed isn’t a checklist. It’s a standard. Instead of making sure we hit the right points in our first year, Derek and I set a standard for our marriage in our first year. And we made it high.
The verse we used at our wedding, the verse hanging in our bedroom and inscribed on my husband’s wedding band is Colossians 3:14, which follows after Paul lists the qualities we as Christians should have including compassion, kindness, humility, forgiveness. Then in Colossians 3:14, Paul says, “and above all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”
That is our standard for marriage. Love. I know that sounds quaint enough to stitch on a pillow, but it’s so much more than that. In fact, Paul tells us it’s not about giving love. It’s about “putting on love.”
In our first year of marriage, I put on a lot of frustration and apathy. I put on impatience and maybe even some nagging. Honestly, I don’t know what happens after you get married, but somehow and sometimes, our sweet feminine tone turns into a whiny nag.
Or so I’m told.
It’s easy to put on those things. It’s easy to lace your lips with sarcasm, but Paul demands more of us. He tells us to put on love, which isn’t easy. Sometimes our selfishness scratches against love and doesn’t feel right, and we have to let something go because to put on love is to put off frustration, apathy, nagging.
And we did it by first honoring and loving God—in all things and in all situations. Our first year hasn’t been newlywed bliss all the time, and God has given us a range of circumstances in the first year that both challenged and blessed us. The only way we handled the changes is by honoring his will for us and together, loving and trusting his plan.
Secondly, we put on love by respecting each other, again in all things and in all situations. I’ve found that one of the best ways to put on love for my husband is to watch baseball with him. It was pretty dull for me at first, but I learned to respect his passion for the game and slowly, I’ve begun to love the game as well. Also, Derek has helped warmed my heart to the sport by buying me all sorts of Texas Rangers merchandise.
Kidding aside, we make a commitment to put on love every day in our marriage and to leave our selfishness behind. It isn’t always perfect, but we aren’t going to get the most from our marriage with a checklist. We will continue to grow and learn over the years, but we won’t accept anything less than the standard we set in our first year as a married couple.
FEATURED CONTRIBUTOR:
Amanda Casanova is a writer living in Texas with her amazing husband. She is a Texas A&M University graduate and has worked for several newspapers in Texas. She blogs at amandacasanova.wordpress.com and is a writer for Whole Magazine.
