We can both honestly say that once you have walked down the isle, the bride’s dress has been boxed to be put away and the groom’s tux has been returned; you have just completed the EASIEST part of marriage.
We don’t want to scare you, but this is the truth through our eyes. We have been married for 4 years now and have been through a whole lot together. By no means are we experts, but we feel we have learned enough to share our views on being a team. We have been joined in holy matrimony and we work together…and live together….and do everything together! The hard part comes after the wedding, when you are tackling life full force together. We have experienced this multiple times since being married.
Our wedding took place while we lived in Utah and not long afterwards, we realized that we did not want to spend the rest of our lives in the beehive state. We were far from any family and longed for the lush green scenery of the northeast United States. Since our move out to Tooele, a town southwest from Salt Lake City, we had purchased a new car, furniture, appliances and a house ALL bought with credit. We didn’t own anything we had and our payments were sucking most of our income. Once we decided that we wanted to move back home to Ohio and since we now wanted to become full time wedding photographers, we knew big changes needed to happen. We started reading Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover and assessing our finances. The Debt Snowball was the start of us paying off our smaller bills first, then using the money that we previously used to pay on those small bills to tackle the larger ones. This was not easy! I love to go out shopping and spend money. Loren had just taken up specialty coffee as a hobby and was wanting all new gadgets and equipment. But we both knew that our main goal was to move and be able to sustain ourselves after the move so that we could focus on what we love, wedding photography. With discipline and teamwork, we eventually paid off everything but our mortgage and were able to make plans to move back home.
Of course the move itself was a long process. 4 months long! I was able to get a transfer to Ohio with the bank I was working at part time and at this point, Loren was waiting to be laid off from his job. His options were to deploy to Afghanistan or quit. They wanted him to quit so he wouldn’t have access to the benefits that he was entitled to. He resolved to do neither and therefore wait for his boss to finally lay him off. In the meantime, I was living with my in-laws in Ohio while Loren stayed behind in Tooele to sell the house. This was such a hard time for us, to be apart for that long. Even though we had Skype to see each other, I hated that we couldn’t be together. But we were doing what we thought was smart, to move back to Ohio with as little bills as possible so that we could focus our energies into our business. We sacrificed our time together for a short while so that we could spend more time working towards our goals of being full time wedding photographers.
Working, living and doing everything together is a blessing but it is far from easy! You have heard the saying: “There is no ‘I’ in TEAM”. It’s true! When we were married, we agreed that we were a team and nothing was going to come between the two of us. This was important because when you work with your spouse, it’s natural to take what they say more personal than if you were in another workplace setting. It’s natural to get defensive when given a different viewpoint other than your own. We have to have patience with one another, be kind when the other is offering up suggestions and understand that there is more than one way to accomplish something. (That is one I honestly have a hard time with!) One thing you have to remember is this: You are both working towards a common goal. Even if you and your spouse do not work together, you are working towards a cleaner home, becoming a better family, having a better life with more opportunity for that family. Whatever your role in your marriage, there is a team that has to collectively make things happen to survive day to day and be productive individuals.
These are just examples of times when marriage has taught us what it is like to learn to work together. There are instances when we don’t like what must be done or the final outcome is not what we predicted but we push on together and learn how to make the situation better or prevent the same thing from happening again. We have learned that OUR marriage works best by being a team and agreeing on what our major life goals are. Then you do what it takes to get there. With Loren and I, we know that as long as we can work together to overcome the daily obstacles that come our way while being supportive to each other and using our individual strengths to help us get “there”, us and our marriage will survive.