A week later, my husband and I sat nervously in our pastor’s office. After much prayer, we had decided to seek help in getting our marriage back on track. In the beginning, our pastor listened to each of us talk. My husband was gentle when he spoke of me, but it still hurt to realize that I had become short-tempered and snappy when talking to him and the children. And he seemed truly surprised to learn how frustrated I was and how often my anger was masking weariness and frustration. We both were in tears by the end of our meeting. But at the same time, I felt a deep relief at having all the stress and pain in the open. It felt freeing! It was the first time in days I felt confident things might be okay.
At the end of our session, he handed us a card and told us to go home and take an online marriage assessment and come back in with our results the following week. “I know you both love each other,” he told us. “I can see it in the way you look at one another. The way you hold hands and sit close together. I think your challenge is communication. You’re not ‘hearing’ each other anymore. I think this can help you figure out why.”
When we got home that night, we took the test together. Even just filling out the questions, I began to see some of the issues my husband and I were having more clearly. And when we went through our results, we really began to understand why we had been struggling. So much of my frustration was coming from the way I judged my husband’s parenting style. He was being easygoing because he wanted peace, while I was more firm because I wanted organization. And the way we handled conflict was completely opposite! I was holding frustration in and he was avoiding tough conversations to try keep things calm. In the end, it was having a negative effect on our relationship and pushing us apart when we desperately needed to work together.
When you go through premarital counseling, you learn a lot about how to treat your spouse. But it doesn’t always prepare you for how you both will change. How different your lives will be when you add kids and bills and work into the mix. How you communicate the first day of marriage may be drastically different ten years down the road. And if you’re not careful, or you don’t recognize it, you could wind up hurting one another by accident.
The day I lost my temper still embarrasses me, but in many ways, I think it was the wake-up call I needed to change the way I was living as a wife and for Jeff to grow as a husband. Things are not perfect (are they ever?), but Jeff and I have been using what we’ve learned from our assessment and working with our pastor to continue building our marriage back to the way it was before we let the busyness of daily life pushed us apart. It’s taken change, humility, and a lot of prayer, but with determination and God’s strength, I feel like we’ve got this!
