What I’ve Learned in Eleven Years of Marriage

As I’ve looked around at the marriages I love, and honestly looked inward at my own, I’ve noticed something unsettling. My parents, Rachel’s parents, Rachel and me – when we’re tired, we get short with each other. When our bodies hurt, we get short with each other. The person who gets the worst version of us is almost never a stranger or a coworker. It’s the one we’ve promised our whole life to.

Last year I wrote that the thread running through our marriage is intentionality, and the year before that, sacrificial love. Eleven years in, I can recognize what’s sitting underneath both. So much of how I love Rachel comes down to what I actually have left to give her by the time the moment arrives. When I’m rested, healthy, and paying attention, loving her comes easily. When I’m depleted, I have to fight for it, and I don’t always win. This year taught me to be even more careful about handing each other the leftovers of ourselves, and to start guarding the reserves from which we love each other. Let me explain.

Taking Care of My Health As a Way of Loving Rachel

When I don’t sleep, I’m a worse husband. When I haven’t been exercising, or when I’m dealing with some physical ache or sickness that I really need to get checked out by a doctor, I’m a worse husband. I wrote about a version of this a decade ago in Sleeping With My Wife, back when we were eight months in and I was still learning to share a bed. Rachel told me even then that after a good night’s sleep I was “a different person,” more patient, more attentive, more her “husband” and less my “to-do list.” That stung, because it meant my bad days don’t just cost me on those days. They cost her as well.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then. Being tired or in pain doesn’t actually make me impatient. It just removes the guardrails on the impatience that was already sitting there in me. Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit, and when I’m depleted I simply have less of it on hand to draw from. So taking care of my body, then, isn’t vanity and isn’t self-actualization. It’s protecting my capacity to be kind to the people God gave me.

Now of course, life does not always cooperate. There are seasons involving newborns, deadlines, issues with elderly parents, kids who are ill, and other such challenges. At those times, plentiful sleep and prioritizing self-care may not happen no matter how disciplined you are. I get that. But I’ve also caught myself pretending I have less control than I actually do. A lot of my exhaustion is self-inflicted, like staying up late to watch my favorite team just because I love them so much, finding an excuse to not work out, or putting off the doctor’s visit I know I should schedule. If my body hurts, am I doing what I actually can to get to a better place, whether through exercise (any form!), through a doctor, through medication, even through surgery if that’s what it takes? Because I’m not the only one who pays for my aches. Rachel pays for it too. Pursuing my own health, then, is one of the more loving things I can do for my spouse, and I think we all need to start thinking about it this way. This is not some sort of massive revelation, but it has honestly changed how I think about the health choices I make. They aren’t just for me anymore.

Protecting Rachel’s Time to Tend Her Heart

If the first lesson is about guarding my own reserves, this one is about guarding hers.

Rachel is a better wife, mom, and friend, and a more settled version of herself when she has had time to tend her heart. For her that looks like being in the Word, putting on worship music, going for a walk, getting a workout in, having a few quiet minutes that belong to no one but her and God. When she gets that, she is the best version of herself. When she goes days without it, I can see the joy slowly drain out, and I can feel things start to go sideways.

So I’ve made it a goal to help her get that time every single day. This is harder than it sounds, because it usually asks me to do the exact things my flesh does not want to do. It means taking the kids when I’m wiped out and just want silence and solitude. It means handling stuff that needs to be done so she can go for a walk. It means noticing she hasn’t had a minute to herself and choosing to address that before I do what I want to do.

I think about the parable of the sower a lot here. Jesus described seed that fell among thorns, and how “the worries of this life” grew up and choked it out. That isn’t a story about a dramatic loss of faith. It’s about a slow strangling by ordinary busyness. The laundry and the after-school classes and the refrigerator in need of constant refilling are not evil, but they are very capable of crowding God out of my wife’s day if nobody fights for the space. Fighting for that space is absolutely a responsibility of mine.

Ephesians 5 tells husbands to love their wives the way Christ loved the church, giving himself up for her to make her holy. I used to read that as a lofty, abstract command. Now it looks very ordinary. Sometimes loving Rachel toward holiness just means starting my workday a little later in the morning so she can sit with her devotional and a cup of coffee, undisturbed. I can help protect her faith with what I do, not just what I say. So I prioritize this.

Rachel and I need to guard the reserves we love each other from. Whatever’s in there is what the other person gets, and so we can’t let them run dry.

To be sure, I don’t have this mastered. I still sometimes choose my sports teams and go to bed later than I should. I still get a little snippy when my back hurts badly. I still let a day or two here or there slip by without making sure Rachel has had meaningful time for herself. But articulating these goals has made me want to do better, and most weeks I have done a pretty darn good job. If your marriage isn’t where you want it to be, maybe pick just one of these to start. Guard your own health, or guard your spouse’s time with God. And maybe it will move the needle in your relationship as it has in mine.

Feel free to check out lessons learned at my six month, one year, two year, three year, four year, five year, six year, seven year, eight year, nine year, and ten year anniversaries!

Part of: Christian Marriage