alyciatimm

“May you always be kind to each other.

May your house be filled with much laughter.

And may the desire of your hearts always be to sing the other person’s song.”

-Mark Timm (August 4, 2018)

I don’t hate my husband. I also don’t understand why modern culture seems to believe that I should.

Culture, and TV, and Facebook memes all make marriage out to be this spiteful, irritated life tied to this person who drives you insane. It has become considered comedy for a person to tear down their spouse. It is so culturally accepted to “need a long break” that someone like me, who doesn’t necessarily want or need a vacation without my husband, appears clingy or dependent.

That’s not the case at all. I just really like the man that I married, and I find joy in his company.

If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be married to him.

Sometimes when I say this stuff to someone who has been married for 10, 20, 30 years, they give me a little laugh, and they say, “Eh, you’re both young. Just give it a few more years.” And it’s all in good humor, but at the same time, why wish that on me, joking or not?

Why joke that there will be a day when I see my husband as more of a pest than a companion?

I don’t hate my husband, and I never intend to. That takes a lot of work on his part and mine.

Life in our little blue house is far from perfect. We bicker, we disagree, we are both proud owners of strong and opinionated personalities, but we chose each other for a reason… because we like each other, and every day we find more and more things that we like about each other, that we like about our marriage, and that we like about who we are as a spouse to this other person.

Every single day we strive to live my father’s wedding toast to us, even if most days this task is hard, ugly, and imperfect.

Every single day, we strive to be kind to each other.

Every single day, we work to fill this little home with laughter.

But most of all, we work diligently, each and every day, to sing each other’s song.

I grew watching The Music Man. There is a scene in the musical where the male lead, Harold Hill, is singing his signature song, 76 Trombones, and the female lead, Marian, is singing her own signature song, Goodnight My Someone.

About halfway through his song, Herald stops, and begins to sing, Goodnight My Someone. When Marian’s part rolls back around, she begins to sing, 76 Trombones.

My grandpa once told my dad that he believes this is what love is- the desire to sing someone else’s song instead of your own. Six years ago, when my dad saw the way I was looking at that tall, sarcastic, Chicago boy- he shared this same lesson with me.

This is what he was referencing in our wedding toast- and that nurtured desire, that need to sing each other’s song, is what has driven us forward for years when life loaded our shoulders with burdens that many marriages fail to carry.

Over this short, but so very loaded, marriage we have made a lifetime of sacrifices. There have been so many seasons where my dreams were put on hold to support him, but there have also been so many seasons when his dreams were put on hold to support me. There are seasons when it feels like his song is loud and demanding and my song is barely heard in the background, and there have been seasons of the exact opposite.

But every once in a while, we fall into this season where I sing his song, and he sings mine, and the flow of the harmony is perfect- heavenly. This is the incredible, God-given gift of matrimony, and this couldn’t happen if I didn’t love AND like my husband. This couldn’t happen if we didn’t work to choose kindness, laughter, the tune of each other’s soul every single day.

This marriage would have broken years before our vows if we never chose to sing each other’s song.

So beautiful girl in the hard marriage, the new marriage, the old marriage, the broken marriage- this is my advice to you.

Keep culture out of your matrimony. Don’t create unnecessary hate, irritation, aggravation for your husband just because it gets a few laughs on sitcoms.

Instead, work diligently to be kind to each other.

Strive to fill each day, the good, the bad, and quite frankly, the boring, with laughter.

And never, ever, ever allow yourself to lose the desire to sing each other’s song.