12.5 years ago I chose to marry Chad.  I chose to love him all the days of my life.  I still choose every day to love him and keep the covenant I made 12.5 years ago to him and to God.  That’s the thing about marriage – it’s for life.  It’s a choice.  It’s hard work.  It’s worth the work.

Here are some examples I came up with for what it practically looks like to choose love:

• We each have strengths and weaknesses, that’s what makes us a good team.  What makes a good marriage is allowing him to have his strengths and not pushing yours on him.  He’s not like me.  He’s not detail-oriented.  And that’s good, or else we wouldn’t have future plans for our finances, our home, our family.  I choose love by letting him be who he is and loving him for it.
• He loves “Top Gear” on the BBC.  I don’t.  There, I said it.  But it’s how he unwinds, so either I can watch it with him or do something else.  I choose love by not complaining when it’s on.  Again. 🙂
• I have to let him defend himself in an argument, even if I think he’s wrong.  It doesn’t matter what I think, he has that right.
• When I start a conversation with, “I get frustrated when…” then he follows with, “I can’t talk about this yet,” I choose love by giving him time and space to process what I said.  If I force a conversation right now it will most likely get ugly, and that’s not the end goal.
• When we’re upset (I know it sounds like we fight a lot, we don’t, this is just important to me), our conversations seem to move at a very slow pace with many pauses.  This is because we choose love by really thinking about what we want to say and how we should say it.  Instead of “You don’t understand” I say “I feel like you don’t understand”.
• I choose love by doing my best to keep an even tone and not using any words I’ll have to apologize for later.
• I choose love by saying, “I’m sorry that I ______,”…. and then nothing else.  No justifications, no more defending my side, just an apology.  THAT will go very far, my friends.  But you have to mean it.  You have to understand what you’re apologizing for.  You have to understand what wrong you’ve done.

Once again, I don’t have this all figured out.  I could write a whole, very long, post about what I do wrong (maybe I should).  Marriage is important to me – mine and yours.  I want to encourage you and stand by you.

How do you choose love?

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