MARRIAGE IS HARD

REPOSTED from my facebook page:
Marriage is hard.
Quote from Glennon Doyle Melton, "Instead of making peace, we are keeping the peace." Boy, do I feel that. Most days, it's just going through the motions and the only conversations we have are around logistics (who is taking which kid where). I mean, who has time to get into anything deeper than that?!
"It's just a phase," they tell me.
And I understand that there are phases of life but we can't keep saying "Let's coast until we get through this"phase."!! Because then the next phase comes and we're still too busy and too tired! I don't know about you guys but life is NOT slowing down. And the stuff we put off is not going away on it's own (*shock*).
And maybe we think that other person will still be there when things settle down. But what if they're not? Or what if they are but they aren't the same person?
Knowing each other requires intimacy...and that comes from deep-diving into each other's lives. But intimacy takes effort and deliberate actions. It takes shifting our priorities and putting our marriage relationship at the top of our TO DO list (God first for me). Above our jobs, above our families, above our friends, above our hobbies. But after putting it off for so long, now finding that closeness isn't always fun. In fact, it might be uncomfortable, tedious or frustrating.
And in a world where something breaks and we just replace it...it's discouraging because fixing something feels so HARD to me. It's heavy. Easy would be: Not now. Keep the peace for now. We'll do the hard stuff when we have more [time, energy] or less [work, stress, kid activities, social pressure].
But the hard stuff isn't going away! And the longer it sits, the heavier it gets. And all that heavy is suddenly blocking the love. Until it's too heavy to lift alone.
And that's when you pray really really hard. And those two people better start working together and using muscles they haven't used in years. And you know what? It burns and hurts and it doesn't feel like love. In fact, it feels like pain. And pain is something we are taught to avoid. But what if we can't? What if we have to push through the pain to find the love? Maybe all that procrastination means it's going to be tougher than it's ever been. FIXING is going to be hard. Maybe even harder than replacing. There's no instruction manual. No YouTube video. No easy button. Just two people trying to move that heavy and find each other again.