We’ve been through quite a bit in our 13 years of marriage. We’ve suffered loss together, faced life-threatening sickness, fought and argued countless times, and enjoyed a bounty of joyful seasons. It seems that most enter marriage expecting to experience the latter (joy) most if not all the time, but they forget to prepare for the difficult seasons. Every married couple struggles at some point.…
Video: Maintaining a Healthy Sex Life After We’ve Had Kids
There is quite a learning curve when you get married. Lots to learn, lots to figure out. Sooner or later, kids arrive on the scene and everything changes, so you have to start re-learning how to maintain a healthy marriage in new, wonderful ways. One of the biggest challenges most couples face (and we’ve gotten this question quite a bit) is how to maintain a…
5 Indispensable Habits for Rock-Solid Communication
There’s such security knowing that we’re both in this marriage thing for the long haul. Selena and I are far from perfect…FAR. In fact, we’ve had two significant arguments in the past 15 hours, and that includes 7-8 hours of sleep, hanging out with friends for 3 hours, and about 2 hours of work. That leaves about 2-3 hours where we’ve been alone together and we…
Trust Your Gages: Navigating Storms in Marriage (part 2)
In my last post I explained how I was flying home late one night and the foggy weather coupled with darkness made it impossible to see where the plane was landing. I got a little nervous but had to remember that the pilots have a whole suite of instruments (gages) that tell them everything they need to know for a safe landing. Many times in…
Trust Your Gages: Navigating Storms in Marriage (part 1)
I was traveling for work recently and the flight home was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had lately. It was a long day of travel with the last leg being a late flight, scheduled for arrival at 10pm. Darkness coupled with foggy Seattle weather made for a particularly perilous landing…or so I thought.
5 Creative Ways to Love Your Husband
In response to many inquiries we’ve received, here are a few creative ways I’ve discovered to intentionally and authentically love my husband. They aren’t the end all be all, but my hope is that they will help spur other creative ideas, as well as remind us, as wives, how our words and actions can inhibit or spur on our husbands. Intentionality, creativity, consistency and sincerity…
Every Marriage Needs a Savior
Being authors of a marriage blog comes with its ups and downs. On the upside we get to be on the receiving end of encouraging messages (thank you!). On the downside, it’s super easy to coast along, feeling like you have it all together as a married couple… but believe me, there are seasons where we feel as if we are coexisting rather than being married.
Video: Blind Devotion
My wife shared this video with me late last night as I was preparing for bed. She simply texted it to me with a message, “you need to watch this right now”. Selena doesn’t share much in the way of interesting or inspiration articles she finds on the web. So when she insisted I watch, I knew it must be very good. Turns out, she…
Young couple: if we could have coffee together, here’s the one thing I’d tell you
Someone asked me the other day, “If you could have coffee with every young couple who reads your blog, what would you say to them?” The question caught me off guard and I didn’t know how to answer them right away. After a few days of hashing through quick responses, I kept coming up short. I even asked our Facebook family what they’d say (below); the comments are awesome, but…
Sean Lowe: Faith, Fighting Fiercely and His First Year of Marriage
Ryan and I had the privilege of sitting down with last season’s The Bachelor, Sean Lowe, to talk about his first year of marriage to the lovely Catherine (Guidici) Lowe (who had a prior commitment). We asked him some pretty pointed questions about his faith in Jesus, how he fights fiercely for Catherine in their marriage, and how they navigate being normal newlyweds despite their not-so-normal dating relationship.