When I met my husband in college, he was so amazing and oh so fine…lol… We were 19 and in LOVE and after ONLY being together a few months, he proposed and my family allowed me to get married at 20 years old. Everything was good until a few months later. After only being married for 2 months, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter Madison. Things started to slowly turn for the worst. Although things were turning for the worst, we were trying our best to maintain and love each other the best way we knew how. I’ll be perfectly honest that me and my husband were young individuals trying to heal each other from the brokenness and voids that we missed in our childhoods growing up and within that alone, we knew we weren’t supposed to be married but because we already were, we were trying our very best to make it work and save ourselves the embarrassment a few months into being married…lol.
Let me just put it out there and say, my husband, Mel, and I had both done and said things on our own to screw up our marriage. Neither one of us were perfect but he always came off as the perfect one to people and that really made me angry. I use to hate when people would say you gotta good man so you need to make sure you do everything right to keep him, it would make me upset because he had a good woman too. Like, is he married to himself?? I just didn’t get it. Our biggest issue was church! My husband could NOT find balance. He wouldn’t miss an engagement, a service, or rehearsal and I was over it. I remember one day, I told him I was going to tell the pastor he needed to be sat down because he wasn’t paying me attention at home and my husband threw his bible across the room and said forget it all and punched 2 holes in the wall of our apartment. Chile, we have had some very eventful days. HA!
It was then that I knew I needed to fight this battle a different way. I tried to pray, fast, get marital advice but nothing seemed to be working. So, I am asking God what do I do?!?!? By this time, my daughter was here and things started to at least seem like they were getting better but the problem that we had when adversity would come, was that we didn’t know how to work through those small arguments, we made everything bigger than what it needed it to be. We would go days without talking, being intimate, or even praying together because this thing that we thought we wanted began to be a bit much. I started to question if he was really the one for me or if I was the one for him. My husband was/is great but I wanted everyone to know that I was too and my husband started to devalue who I was too him. So, 3 years into the marriage, I decided that this marriage was not something I wanted anymore and I was adamant about it. I felt like my husband didn’t love me, his music was more important and so was everything and everyone else. I felt like I was the last person he had on his mind and I didn’t want to stay with someone who didn’t want me.
We didn’t go on vacations, we were broke, overwhelmed with life, and exhausted from the daily arguments over trivial things. My husband was the only one who could make mistakes in the marriage and I had to be the one who was always forgiving, he had control over the finances, I felt like I had to consult him about every little thing and I was like ummmmm this ain’t the life I thought I wanted. LOL. I had a job since I was 16 years old, got my first car with the help of my Papa, and I was always on the go before I got married. My mom raised me to be very independent and I was! So, to lose all of that for a man who was too concerned about his self. I was like dueces…..
I knew that wasn’t the will of God for my life…..
God was telling me to fight for everything but I felt like I was fighting alone. So, I was done! Once he knew I was done, it got his attention and he fought hard for me. I mean hard! It was the first time since we dated that I felt like he saw me, wanted me, and I mattered to him. But I was done and I was afraid to give him my heart again. People in the church thought I was cheating on him and I wasn’t. People began to spread horrible rumors about me and it hurt me to my core that I began to rebel and resent him even more. I will let my husband tell his own story one day but our marriage being jacked up wasn’t just me. I probably shouldn’t have hung around certain people, had certain conversations, but I was a lost girl with a broken marriage, trying to find herself and some people took advantage of that but I was the one who was looked at with the side eye. However, I was called everything but a child of God because of the company I was entertaining. It was innocent but it didn’t look right and I can admit that. So, the things people said about me were NOT true and NO ONE came to my rescue. We had no help. No one to pull us aside and pray for us or counsel us. It was the worst season of my life!
He moved out, and me and my daughter stayed in our apartment alone. I would go to work every day. I felt like I was getting my life back, I pulled away from certain company and I started to create an atmosphere for God to come back into my life. It was hard, to say the least. The love I had for my husband was not there and I was still bitter from the neglect. But one day, my husband asked if we could go on a date. I agreed to go because something in me was shifting. I begin to see that I couldn’t let it go that easy. Although my flesh was fighting against it, my spirit was saying fight for it.
As time went on, God began to slowly heal our broken hearts. My husband apologized and so did I. We apologized for the mess we created, the unstable environment we put our daughter in, and for giving up on each other so easily. Our sex life was amazing and we begin to truly seek God on each other’s behalf. It wasn’t easy all the time and even now we still have problems but we realize our responsibility to one another and the call of God that is on our lives is greater than what we can even expect. So, we intentionally fight every day in prayer and in the natural to maintain a healthy marriage. We’ve just celebrated our 12 year anniversary this past June and I still can’t believe we made it this far! BUT GOD!
I want to encourage every woman to hold on to what God said is yours. I would not only pray but I would also seek professional help. You may be going through some things and your feelings may be valid but put that man in your heart and get on your knees and fight on your husband’s behalf, fight for your marriage, and pray that God will keep you in perfect peace through the up’s and down’s of marriage so that you can stand through it all. It’s not easy and it may take time but there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. Truth be told, sometimes it ain’t even worth fighting for, and that’s my honest opinion. Some people really do have it worse than others, so I would also suggest, you do what’s best for you sis!! Without a test or trial, we would never know what our greatest strengths are. Be vigilant and stay on the wall and try not to curse mister out lol…
I know my first blog post was extremely long but I couldn’t help myself!!
I hope you come back again soon!
Martina