After your faith, your marriage is the most important thing you will have in your life. There’re so many other important responsibilities in your life. Like children, your job, relationships with your friends and family and chores. But the most important is your relationship with your spouse.
So often we put our children and their needs first. Their extracurricular activities, their joy and happiness and although that’s very important, your first responsibility isn’t to your children but it’s to your spouse.
It’s so important to your children that they see the love, respect and care that goes into a marriage. And it needs a lot of it. It’s important not to correct your spouse in front of the children (or anyone for that matter). They need to know that you are a team. They are a part of that team but mom and dad’s loyalty reigns with one another.
What will you do when the children are grown and come to find out you spent so much time focused on the children that you don’t even know your spouse. That you didn’t take time to go through the growing and changing together and now there’s no children to make you feel the need to work things out or to continue to grow.
Marriage isn’t 50/50 it takes 100% effort from you both to make a marriage happy and successful. It takes giving way more than you take. It takes sitting aside your pride and having to be right and just letting the other “win” sometimes. Letting them have their time. Sometimes I have my days where I’m having a bad day or I’m moody and my husband just helps more with the kids or he lets me have my time to be moody that day without making things worse by arguing but I just never disrespect him. And there’s times when that role is reversed.
In a marriage there’s a responsibility for each of you. No responsibility is more important than the other. No person is more important than the other but I am a strong believer that the husband is the head of the household. He makes all the final decisions in our home but he always talks things over with me and takes my input and if he doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other, he goes with my opinion or thoughts. Some people don’t like that old-fashioned way of living but as I stated each person in a marriage is equally as important as the other. I feel he can be the head of our home so I can be the heart. You need both. Both roles are necessary.
Just remember your children watch everything you do. Not just what you say but how you live your life. Be their example of a marriage. Be their example of a good person. Be reliable. Be loving. And be respectful. Showing them love for others, especially your spouse, shows them love for themselves. It shows them how someone should treat them. No marriage is perfect and no marriage will ever be but making your marriage your main focus is certainly a start.
