THE GOOD, THE BAD BUT STILL GOOD…AND THAT MARRIAGE ISN’T FOR US.

We celebrate a ridiculous amount of small things. We just do! Sam’s older brother even poked fun at us in his Best Man’s speech at our wedding – we didn’t even realize this until he said it.

Let me be the first to say that we don’t know everything. Being married for 1000 days by no means makes us experts (in fact, we are no where close!) but here 5 Quick things that were great lessons in our first sprint of married life and living together for the first time.

Year #1 we learned that LIFE (not marriage) is the hard work.  

While we were engaged, it was such a downer for people to say to us “Marriage is hard work.” How is that uplifting to say? Honestly, let’s all stop saying that because that phrase sounds like marriage is dreadful and naggy… and honestly it sounded exhausting when majority of the time…it’s not.

Paying bills, fumbling at figuring out what we wanted to even do with our careers and therefore often job-hopping, running youth ministry , and moving away from our hometown and families to establish ourselves – all of those typical and unavoidable life struggles… THAT is what I would have classified as hard work. Compared to that, marriage is the sweet part of life – I come home every day to Sam who has vowed to love me regardless of how much I mess up, which gives me the freedom to relax. Having someone fighting in your corner, and a companion to get through everything is the best thing ever.

I said HECK YES when Sam proposed knowing that my life would be so much more fun and full-filing with him on lock down for good!

We learned that Marriage wasn’t for us.

No, not in the way you think! But by that I mean that you have to live selflessly in marriage. The best thing we learned was that if we each work on making the other one a priority and putting their happiness above our own, the other one returns that same love.

Marriage isn’t about me. I’m not living to enrich my own life – it’s about enriching his.

This only works because we are both living by that same motto. Until we both dove into that mindset, we had some stupid fights. One night after a fight, Sam came to bed where I was pouting and he read me his wedding vows from a little piece of paper where he kept them in his wallet. I can only assume that I got mad at Sam for something petty which blew into something bigger. After listening to his vows again and seeing that he kept them close, I realized how I was really being a terd. He could have responded with the same cold shoulder as I had given him a million times for millions of immature reasons, but instead he chose to show me an outpouring of love. The only hard part of marriage (so far for me) is being less selfish. This called for compromises on both sides which we make alterations to all the time.

Remain in the mindset that “I vowed for this to be my forever marriage and I will not give up.” 

We take our vows really seriously. Life gets hard and then relationships/marriages suffer. I get that. We’ve barely had an appetizer of that. However, our mindset is that we are a permanent team – we make a daily promise to be fully present in our marriage.  Therefore being open about how divorce will never be on the table for us has helped us through a lot of junk. In our heads we are thinking, Okay, here is the present struggle…now how can we love each other well through it… and then get past it?

Our 2nd year of marriage we learned a valuable lesson: Go with the flow. Tip 2:

We moved away from our hometown and families in 2014 and had to immediately find new jobs…and I found one, but Sam didn’t. For about a year we scraped pennies, and Sam went back to school to learn UX / UI design for Designing Apps up in Washington D.C, while I held the fort down in Richmond, Virginia. We were HUGE babies with separation anxiety, but during that transitional season of our lives we learned how to be grounded with undivided teamwork EVEN when endless curveballs showed up. Sam’s car decided to BURST into flames, my dad got cancer, I found myself in a very hostile office enviornment, we were long distance, in mild debt, and we were trying to grow a small business. Life felt heavy.

We learned how to make the most of weekends and stretch our pennies. We found out what a gift Sam has for budgeting and having an abundance mindset with more than just tangible resources. A blessing born of hardship, Sam stepped up and lead our family in a hard time. Somehow we even had money left over to tour Iceland for 11 days and also to funnel money into savings every month. Instead of fighting the current life we were kinda drowning in, we held onto each other and our faith.

Lastly, we learned to continue to always celebrate the positives and to remain thankful for them.

There is so much negativity you can allow yourself to be consumed by. When we face a crummy situation, we face it and quickly. Look for the flowers amongst the weeds. We handle things in a way where we are always trying to look for the positives and push forward a joyful and downright celebratory manner.

For example: Ugh, we booked a family session instead of that wedding we really wanted. But then we realize, wow, God provided income. Wow, we had two inquiries instead of none. Wow, we have our health and each other. Life is more than ok, we have more than enough. An abundance mindset does come more naturally the more you do it.

Life has been hard, but marriage has honestly been a blast and even though we faced some less than ideal seasons, our first 1000 days has been amazing. Our families and friends have loved us and encouraged us with kindness and generosity and we are so thankful.

Again, we merely know 1000 day’s worth of marital knowledge. Which in retrospect is next to nothing. But we are in it together and today for a silly reason to some, we will celebrate. Tonight we are celebrating our small victory of 1000 days by rolling the car windows down and turning the music up, Donuts in hand… because its a also National Donut Day. 🙂

Images by Tara Liebeck Photography (2013)

Love,

The Tuckers