How Do I Go from "Me" to "We" in My Marriage?

The following is a transcribed Video Q&A, so the text may not read like an edited article would. Scroll to the bottom to view this video in its entirety. 

I thought when I got married that was it, I’ve arrived. The culmination of love is courtship, dating, yes he wants to ask me to marry him, that means we’re done. What I have come to realize is that the day you say your vows is the day you begin to start to learn how to love. It is a clean slate at that point. Everything leading up to that moment is like a movie preview and not the actual narrative. The actual narrative comes in that time.

That process of learning to be a “me” to a “we” is a long process. It is paved with wounds, with rich experiences together, and with reconciliation and forgiveness. And I believe it is one of the fullest expressions of what God really meant unconditional love to look like. That sounds real fancy and fairy tale but it is not. It is in the hard things. It is in the who is going to do the dishes, why do you leave your stuff there, and what is going on with us and how come you don’t talk to me. It is in the places of feeling deeply lonely within a marriage. That doesn’t get said much. People think they are lonely because nobody is around them, but sometimes the loneliest people are often the people who actually feel as if they shouldn’t be lonely because of the life they have. Those are the places where God starts to do really good work through our marriages.

I think we have an opportunity to be sanctified, that’s such a Christianese word, but the word is really refined. I think that word is refined. We learn about the process of being changed in the places of a marriage, in the deepest places of a marriage; the vulnerability, the exposure, the fights. How do we come back from fights? Don’t try to not fight just try to come back from them. How do we do that? How do we come back to this argument?

I was with a young friend yesterday who said, “we had a huge fight and it was our anniversary.” I said, “well, how did you resolve it” and she said, “It’s not resolved.” Okay, I’m glad you know it’s not resolved so what are you going to do next? What are you going to do now? Are you going to let it float away or come back to it? Here is a suggestion, what if you went back to your husband and say, “you said this when we were arguing, can you tell me more about what you mean by that?” And that’s it. Don’t even explain what you meant just try to understand him. There is a good start.

If that feels hard, it’s because it is hard. It feels like it shouldn’t be hard because it is the person you are married to, but it actually is hard. And that goes both ways. It is the continual process of not how we don’t fight but how we come back from fights and learn from them.

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