Before I got married, I would often hear the phrase “marriage is hard work”. It was always said as a cautionary statement to those of us unmarried people to prepare for the difficulty that lay ahead. Whenever I heard people say this, I always assumed what they meant by the statement is that marriage is hard work because it is hard to continue to prioritize one another throughout life.

Now, I know the truth.

Have you ever been hurt by someone? (Insert sarcasm.) Of course, YOU HAVE! From the time we were young, we were getting hurt by people. Friends, family, peers on the playground, there are an endless amount of opportunities to get hurt in this life. I have some of the most amazing friends and family a girl could ask for, but that doesn’t mean my relationships come with no cost. There are so many opportunities for misunderstandings…

Motherhood is hard. Period. Whether you have one, two, or twenty children you will feel stretched to the max. However, I recently had my fourth child and I have been surprised by how easily our life has transitioned with our most recent addition. I have been thinking back to what life was like as a new mom and I can’t help but feel it has been easier to have four children than it was to have one.

Let me explain…

In honor of Carter and I celebrating our thirteenth wedding anniversary, I decided to write about love. What is love? Here is a bit of what love is to me. “Love is surprisingly exciting and exceptionally mundane. It is found in traveling around the world together, but also sitting on the couch…” What is love to you?

Living an honest, genuine life comes at a cost and I have found not everyone is willing to pay the price.

It can feel so natural to tell a simple lie to avoid difficulty or awkwardness in our life. There are many reasons we choose to lie, here are six that I have come across …

I will never forget the scariest moment of my marriage. We had been married a couple of years and I found myself feeling very frustrated about some happening between us. I talked to Carter several times about it and he seemed to listen, but our conversations never seemed to bring about any change.

We had been having the same discussion on repeat for weeks.

He may have been listening, but I did not feel heard.

We were not on the same page…

There is nothing simple or easy about love. If you want to find love that lasts through the years, you will need to be ready to experience a lot of ups and downs.

I have been in a relationship with the same man for 17 years.

No breaks.

No separations.

Let me tell you some of the things that I have learned about love after being with the same man for over half of my life.

Babe,

Here we are again. This is our 17th Valentine’s Day together and I would say we have the swing of it at this point.

I love that I know there is a 99% chance there are no surprises coming. (Although those two times you surprised me were pretty fun!)

I love that we both laughed this morning when I asked if you had a surprise get-a-way to the Bahamas planned for today. I love that I asked you if I should pick up my own chocolate covered strawberries or if you had it covered.

I love that at some point I know I will probably receive a card from you that looks like it was painted by Bob Ross and I will roll my eyes and laugh at your card picking skills. I love that I won’t be surprised by anything you say in the card because I know exactly how you feel about me...

I used to be a person of very conditional love. It was common for me to lower people’s value based on my perception of them and their choices. 

Which is quite interesting considering I have spent my entire life dedicated to a faith based on love.

For the past decade, I have been growing my capacity to love and I am quite pleased to say that I am now able to offer love to even the most frustrating of persons.

My ultimate goal?

Unconditional love.  

I have been through a lot with people through the years and I get it.

People suck...

Hopes. Dreams. Expectations. Plans. Goals. Desires.

They are all wonderfully beautiful things... until they aren’t.

There is an art to having expectations. The trick is to find the sweet spot. Right where they push you forward, but don’t hold you back.

I have always been a very positive person and I have never been short on hopes for my future. These hopes turned into plans and then I would then execute those plans. As I did, I expected everything to go exactly according to my very sunny expectations.

Expectations.

Such a simple word with a whole lot of implication.

I realized something interesting about my expectations… well… that they were ruining my life.

Many people do not realize that I am a recovering control freak who was born with a natural ability to manipulate people. From the time I was little, I can remember watching people, listening and learning how people reacted to certain things. From parents, to teachers, to friends, I liked to read people and once I did, I learned how to give them what they wanted for one primary reason... so that I could get what I wanted.

Isn't crazy how life can turn out so different than we expect it to? I have found that even things go how I wanted them to go, the journey often looks quite different than I expected it to. Today on my blog I share a bit of how the very life that has brought to life our dreams, is the very life that has brought forth our nightmares. Enjoy...

Love isn't always hard. But, often times, it is. It can be hard to love our spouses, our friends, our families, our homes, our jobs... or our lives.

I have yet to meet a "lover" who has not also experienced the painful kiss of disappointment, betrayal, and heartache.

When we love, we will inevitably experience disappointment and feel pain. We can slowly determine that the cost of love is too high because it hurts so much. Through the many disappointments that we experience it is easy to choose to love less. 

Despite all of my experiences that have taught me that love is quite costly, I have determined that the cost of not loving is far greater.   

To lose my love is to lose my life...

Get ready for your adventure to begin. You are beginning a long voyage and there is no way to prepare you for what lies ahead. Your life may turn out to be everything you expect or nothing that you predict, or perhaps it will be both, all rolled up into one glorious experience...

We have all been lied to. It is never fun, but it is devastating whenever someone we trust betrays us. When we find out that someone we are in a relationship with has lied to us, it leaves us feeling dazed and confused. Many of us look back and think, “Where did I go wrong?”...

I used to spend my life trying to stay on top of my problems. I used to try to avoid pain and difficulty. I used to find myself striving for perfection. Striving for happiness. No longer. I have now realized that this life is not about striving for perfection either within me or within my circumstances...

In many ways, our first ten years of marriage have gone as I expected they would. My husband is a wonderfully, kind man who has loved me well. We have chased our dreams and seen many of them come true. Most of our days have been beautiful, but not all of them...

I love Carter more today than ever before, this is our fifteenth Valentine’s Day together and I still get excited to spend it with him. Our life together has been an adventure. We have traveled the world, had three children and are planning more, we laugh often, value one another, we have accomplished many of our dreams and have many more on the list! Life together is exciting.

People sometimes say how lucky we are to have such a great relationship. In one sense I understand that they are saying we are fortunate and blessed (which we are), but luck has nothing to do with the relationship that we have...