Our Secret to a Happy Marriage

On her 15th wedding anniversary, Maria Riley shares the secret to their (mostly) blissful marriage.

This month, my husband and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. We celebrated with a dinner out, and simply enjoyed each other's company and thanked God for 15 blessed and fruitful years.

I told my husband that I love him more than the day I married him, but what’s even better, I like him more than the day I married him. Now don’t get me wrong: My marriage isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. We’ve had our fair share of storms, some worse than others. But at the end of the day, he’s still the person I want to hang out with. I look forward to him coming home from work, and he can get me laughing like no one else.

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The Secret Is Love

A friend asked me once what our secret was. I didn’t have an answer for her at the time, but her question got me thinking. I realized the answer is that we both love the Lord more than we love each other. Together, we are journeying toward Christ. This means that we pray together and for each other every day. We prioritize the sanctification of each other’s souls, recognizing that as spouses, our number-one priority is to get the other one to Heaven. We attend Mass together and share our spiritual successes and failures.

The best part of this is that I no longer expect my husband to be my source of happiness and security. That’s Jesus’ role, and so long as I expect my husband to be that for me, our marriage will be strained. My husband could never do what Jesus does for me. Thankfully, over the years, I’ve learned to rely more and more on God and this has removed unnecessary pressure for my husband to be my be-all and end-all.

Mercy Instead of Anger

It’s also allowed me to stop getting upset when my husband hurts my feelings or messes something up accidentally. For example, the other week he backed his car out of our driveway right into our neighbor’s brick mailbox. Thankfully the mailbox remained unharmed. The car was a different story.

When he related this story to me, I was able to stay calm and comfort him in his embarrassment. I could have gotten angry and yelled about him not paying attention while driving. I could have made him feel even worse than he already did. I could have belittled my husband who made a mistake.

I chose a different path. Yelling wouldn’t change the fact that the car needed to go into the shop, all it would do is create pain and tension in our marriage. I chose to forgive his mistake and value our marriage over the price of the repairs. I chose to treat him with dignity and mercy.

The car was still damaged, but our marriage was strengthened. I learned to do this because my husband treats me in the same way. When I completely lose my cool and scream like a mad woman at our children, he hugs me and steps in to manage the kids. When I forget to pay the mortgage with no reasonable excuse, he shrugs and says there are more important things in life than worrying about late fees. When I’m imperfect, he loves me all the more.

Love Like Jesus

That’s what we all are, imperfect people, trying to reach heaven. The more we are able to recognize our own shortcomings, the easier it becomes to forgive quickly and easily. In fact, this is exactly how Jesus loves us. Even though we sin, He’s always ready to forgive us. He doesn’t expect perfection from us, so we definitely shouldn’t expect perfection from our husbands!

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The more we learn to love the way Christ calls us to, the more sanctifying our marriage will become. We will be rewarded in the next life for loving like this, but while we’re still here on earth, the joyful, intimate marriage is pretty awesome too.

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