Today we have a guest post from the Multi Tasking Mama . I love to read and follow her blog and asked her to participate in my Marriage Advice From The Future posts. With marriage you take the good with the bad and the ugly. It’s important to talk about these things and I think you will find this post to be inspiring.

When asked to guest post I wasn’t sure what I wanted to talk about.  Being married for twelve years (next month) gives a gal a lot of fodder to cover J.  But, as often happens when I turn something, such as my writing, over to God the topic became obvious through things going on in my personal life.

Several of my close personal friends are experiencing difficult times in their marriages.  It is so hard to watch friends in pain, especially since it reminds me of challenging times Mike and I faced throughout our marriage.  For anyone to profess that marriage is easy and fun all the time is perpetuating a lie.  Marriage is work, work well worth it but work nonetheless. 

When the concept of separation or divorce is introduced to a marriage, particularly during hard times, it changes the dynamic of the relationship.  All of a sudden a relationship that is based on “forever” has been given an Opt out option.  Please don’t do this to your marriage.  Every challenge, every disagreement needs to occur within the forever context.  Knowing that no matter what (and obviously I am not writing a post about abusive relationships) you and your spouse are in this for the long haul and that promise needs to be in the forefront of your minds at all times.

Please realize that marriages, especially the content and committed ones, will (and have) experience painful, difficult, I wish I wasn’t married to this person times.  We are all human, we all make mistakes, we all have bad days.  Successful marriages are the ones that allow the other the space to make those mistakes, have those bad days and love them anyway.

Mike and I have faced some incredibly difficult times in our marriage.  As a matter of fact because we were so young when we married (I was 18) our marriage was doomed from the start, according to statistics.  And, we did not come from families that modeled appropriate relationships either.  We have learned through attending conferences, reading books, finding couples to mentor us and prayer.  We have also learned what not to do by realizing that it didn’t work well.  And, we have made our commitment to each other, NO MATTER WHAT, that we are in this thing together. 

Make your relationship a priority.  Date your spouse, listen to your spouse, make your spouse’s needs more important than your own.  Then, when those difficult times arrive (and they will because this is real life) you will have a solid foundation to come back to when the storm has passed.  Please keep the concept and word “divorce” out of your relationship vocabulary.