theholtsite

This weekend we celebrated our 7th Anniversary! We’re pretty psyched. We celebrated with a little picnic up at Prospect Hill rd in Harvard. It is right next to Fruitlands Museum where we got married in 2001.

And now, I thought it would be fun to come up with my top 7 things I have learned after 7 years, but due to space….I’ve come up with my top 3!! Here they are.

1. No one has the perfect marriage. I spent a long time comparing our marriage to others’. Through the honesty of people close to me I have been able to accept that every relationship has ups and downs and that many of the struggles we have gone through have been perfectly normal for couples in the first several years.

2. Love and respect. Women want and need to be loved by their husbands. Men want and need to be respected by their wives. I have loved the book Respect and Love, it really seems to get to the core of a marriage relationship and what men and women both need. It’s been an eye opener for me and I think I have finally come to understand the important of respect. Wives can often be sneaky with manipulation, not doing exactly what has been asked by them, talking badly about their husbands, etc. From my experience, this often ends in a conflict where I have then felt like the victims of unkindness. However, upon further examination, I often come to terms with my disrespectful attitude. I have learned that respect is not just a feeling you have towards someone or an admiration. But it is also an attitude and something you can choose to show. Often a husband may not even seem to deserve respect, but as a wife that is something we are called to do

“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing[a] her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body.” – Ephesians 21-30

3. Be effortful in loving each other. What is your spouse’s love language?. Learn to speak it! Be effortful on making sure you communicate your love in a way that will be received and understood. Ben would say thanks if I came home with a new gimicky gadget for him. But, when I shoot him across the room with a nerf dart and declare that I would love to spend quality time with him having a nerf fight.. that shows my love even more because time together means a lot more than a gift!