My Marriage Advice- God, Forever, Money, and Dating :)

I am writing this post to link up with Kelly's Korner for her SUYL marriage advice blogs. Danny and I have only been married seven years (together for almost 14), but we have learned a lot along the way and I think we would both agree that we don't have the perfect marriage, but we do have a great marriage and it gets better all the time!

 

We have received lots of advice on marriage though family, friends, pastors, books, conferences, etc so here are a few that really stuck with us.

1. ALWAYS keep God as the center of your marriage.  For us there is no exception to this rule.  We pray together often and pray for each other everyday. 

2. I don't even remember where we heard this next one, but it stuck.  "If you never say the word "divorce" you can never get one." I love, love, love this rule! We never even joke about it and we definitely don't use it in arguments or as a threat.  We made a lifelong commitment and I find so much comfort in that.  I just had a conversation with a good friend last week about how both her and I may even be "too" comfortable and secure in our marriages.  I love the fact that I can trust Danny 100% and I never worry about whether our marriage is going to last or not.  In talking with my friend, her and I discussed how Satan would love to use that comfort to bring attacks so we always have to be on guard for our marriage and not get too comfortable. 

3. Get serious about getting out of debt and make a budget! When we first got married we were so naive and racked up way too much debt which led to arguing about money...a lot.  Then we took Dave Ramsey's FPU, got ourselves out of debt (with a lot of hard work and sacrifice) and made a budget.  Now we almost never have to argue about it (notice the "almost"- definitely not perfect, here).  We know where every dollar is going and we made the decisions of where it goes together. 

4. Even when you have kids, your marriage still comes first.  This is a hard one because as the parents of a one year old, he is definitely the center of our attention right now.  Most of our life revolves around his schedule and he is a full time job for sure. We love him more than words and cherish our time together as a family, but we still make time for just "us." I am a huge fan of dating your spouse.  In fact that is why I am up early on a Saturday morning because I have a date with my hubby all day today- just the two of us and I am sooo excited that I can't sleep.  We still make it a priority to spend time together even after our baby.  We are more than blessed to have my parents to keep him for us, but if you don't have family close by, trade off with friends.  It is worth it.

I love our not so perfect marriage and the fact that we drive eachother crazy sometimes, but we still know this is for a lifetime.