Today, My husband Joe and I celebrate 32 years of marriage. Not only a celebration, but an achievement, a milestone if you will.

I met my husband when I was 19. It was not love at first sight, but he was a stud, and I took notice! We did not date long before Joe asked me to marry him. When he first asked me, I could not bring myself to say yes. I was afraid. Not of marriage. That seemed awesome and exciting and romantic. But I was afraid of divorce. I had never really seen a marriage, up close and personal, that survived. So when he would talk about marriage, I would always think, ‘but I don’t want to get divorced’. I thought they went together. I wanted ‘happily ever after’, but just didn’t know if it was really possible.

I finally agreed to marry him, and after just 5 months of dating, we were Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Perry. From that point forward, it was roses, wine, and many nights where we lay on the grass, looking up at the stars, bathed in moonlight. We often found ourselves running through fields of daisies, and snuggled up next to one another with the silhouette of a full moon as our backdrop.  (Insert *sigh* here).

Are you buying it?? Me neither. So many people, when they tell their love story, even make all the bad times sound romantic. I can’t do that. I won’t do that. It’s not fair to all those that are out there struggling to make it through the seasons of their marriage, wondering what they are doing wrong. Why can’t their marriage be like ‘that’ they wonder. Well, I want to take a moment and tell you about ‘that’.

‘That’ is a fraud. Our marriage from day 1 has been difficult. Joe and I are both very stubborn and strong willed. I am always right, and after 32 years, he still struggles with that. (Insert eye roll here.) He did one time remark that it must be hard to be right all the time, and after thinking about it for a moment, I replied…”yes… it is.”. So you can see some of the problems I am talking about already.

In the beginning we loved and fought with great intensity. What was good about our marriage, was very good, and what was bad, sucked! I remember thinking, ‘if we can only make it to the first year, then we might be okay’.

What I have learned is that love is mushy. Not in a Hallmark greeting card sort of way, but in a …the two shall become one, kind of way. I mean, there is an intimacy implied by this scripture. It is both spiritual and physical. But there is also a physical/emotional implication here. When God says the two shall become one, it is literally the mushing together of two very different people. Imagine that for a moment. You take two people, and literally mush them together, without killing either one, but all the while killing them both, until they become one cohesive person. In their thinking, in their life goals and in their battles. The battles to be right, to be heard, to be accepted and to be loved.

We have many accomplishments in our marriage. We have raised two sons and a daughter that God put in our lives the summer before her Junior year. There was so much mushing going on in the raising of our children that it would take a book, not a blog, to cover it all. It was very painful. We had many different ideas about how to parent. I am the disciplinarian, Joe has much more grace. If I had married someone like myself, our home may have been more like a prison. If Joe had married someone like himself, it would have looked more like a zoo. But when you mush those two parenting styles together, you have both discipline and grace. It is a pretty healthy environment to raise kids in. But the mushing was hard. I often felt like he wasn’t backing me up, and he often felt that I was being too hard. We both always thought we were right, and in hindsight I see that we were….just at different times.

We have a wonderful home that we have achieved through a lot of very hard work. I am talking about both the bricks and beams and the love and dreams. The amount of mushing that went on (and still goes on) to accomplish this has been horrendous. We think differently about everything. And I mean EVERYTHING! If I think white, he thinks black. If I think left, he things right. It is the most frustrating thing in the world. A simple discussion about where or how to hang something can turn into the most ridiculous argument. I wish we could be like Chip and Joanna Gaines from the Fixer Upper series, and be silly, and roll our eyes at one another, and then just lovingly get to work. But it is nothing like that. It is this tug of war between our two ideas. Lots and lots of pushing and pulling, and then in the end, everything comes out fine. Neither of us understand why it has to be so hard, it just is.

People have many ideas about what marriage is, with the most ridiculous one being that married people should just get along…all the time. We think: He shouldn’t be mean to me. She shouldn’t disrespect me. Why does he always act like that? She makes me so mad!! But that is ridiculous. NO relationship is easy. Parent/child relationships are difficult. Sibling relationships are difficult. Coworker relationships are difficult. Your relationship with your friends can be difficult. What in the world would make you think that marriage should be any different?

When Joe asked me to marry him, and I finally said yes, I told him that he better be sure that this is what he wanted because he was stuck with me. If he ever tried to leave, I would hunt him down like a dog! It was FOREVER!! (Yes… I really did say that to him.) Through all the mushing, we have stood by that commitment. During the hard times, when we didn’t really even like each other, and during the good times. Through all the mushing, we have endured. And it isn’t over yet. There are a lot of years left, and there will be a lot more mushing, but it is a little easier now than it was. I am hopeful that it gets less painful the longer we stand firm in this mushy marriage.

I leave you with the rest of the verse I put at the beginning….