Love and Marriage: Staying together

The Beloved and I are married 15 years next month! Wow! Where did the time go? We've had our share of amazing, ordinary and down-right awful times but there is no-one else I would want to be on this adventure with than my Beloved.

In the run-up to our anniversary I thought it would be fun to have a few posts about weddings, marriage and love.

We enjoyed a wonderful wedding day - full of family, friends and laughter. Honestly, it exceeded all my expectations - it was so beautiful. We were married in St Malachy's Parish Church, Hillsborough, Northern Ireland - fulfilling my childhood dream of getting married in a church with a long driveway!

I'm not sure if The Beloved and I would ever formally renew our wedding vows - recreating any part of that August day would be difficult. Rather each year on our anniversary we sit quietly together and one of us asks "Will we give it another year?" With an echoing "We will" our vows are renewed before each other and God. It reflects the reality that staying together is an annual, monthly, daily, hourly, choice.

Marriage seems to be an invitation to repetition. I don't mean in the 'Take out the trash honey!', 'Watch the child, babe!', 'Pay the bills, darling!' kinda way.  I mean in the 'I will choose you', 'I will choose us'; 'I will choose you',  'I will choose us' kinda way. With repetition comes familiarity, confidence and second-nature proficiency that opens a space for being fully known, accepted and loved. A space where we can be home.