Why I Stayed Married

If you’ve read my post “Why Did I Get Married” you’ll know how my husband and I got married. Now you’ll I will tell you why we stayed married. We got married December 25^th, 2007 he was twenty years old and I was twenty-two. I got pregnant with our first child shortly after we got married in February of 2008 and had him in October 2008. Then I got pregnant again and had our daughter December of 2009. Now in between having these children, some things changed. I stopped working right before our wedding but I stayed in school. I eventually stopped going to school once I got farther along in my first pregnancy. Later my husband stopped working and went to work for our church at the time. Long story short things did not work out with that and our house went into foreclosure. This was in the summer of 2010 after that we decided to relocate to Georgia. After staying with my mother-in-law for a few months we got our own place in another city about forty minutes from her. My husband had a job and I was able to find a job fairly quickly. Everything was supposed to be looking up, right? Not quite.

One day the hubs and I were talking about marriage struggles and marriage in general and by the end of that conversation, he told me that he did not want to not to married anymore. Remember the pretense of how we got married in the previous post. He was also questioning a lot of things about God and wondering if God really meant for us to get married…so that day we separated. That same day I was promoted at my job. So I went to work with that in my mind I couldn’t even be happy about my promotion.

I was a mess. I felt like we were supposed to stay married. I also felt like I was failing in God’s eyes because at the time I was very religious. I remember crying and praying and crying and praying. My best friend at the time gave me some good advice. She basically told me that if I wanted to stay married then believe that I’ll stay married. I believed and we really only separated for about a month and a half or so. However, once we got back together it was me that did not want to stay married and I wasn’t going to stay just because we had children. I honestly felt stupid. Like dude you didn’t want to stay married well now I don’t want to stay married to you. We worked through that I stayed and we got into counseling.  

The counseling was awesome because it was individual counseling and I was able to see things about myself, some unrealistic expectations that I had for him, and some misconceptions that I had about God. He went and he was able to do the same. Being able to work on ourselves was incredibility helpful. We were no longer bound by this unreasonable and extremely religious image of what we thought a marriage was to look like. And from there we were able to create a marriage that fit us. Although we did not start off “in love” we ended up that way and we learned how to love each other unconditionally. We’re in our eleventh year going strong and I only want to strangle him every other day just joking or am I😇