Struggles in Marriage {Whole Magazine Post}

If you’ve been married for any number of years, you’ve probably experienced, at one time or another, a season of dried up love for each other.

Perhaps you’ve just experienced a season of post-partum depression in your life.
Perhaps a job loss has left you feeling hopeless.
Perhaps the death of a family member has made it difficult to cultivate affection for your spouse.

Difficult life circumstances may be succeeding at ripping apart the seams of marriage, draining out love and leaving a hollow emptiness in its place.

Situations arise in life which, understandably, can make love for our husbands seem a distant memory. It can subconsciously encourage us to seek intimacy elsewhere through another mechanism (food, alcohol, shopping) or by another person (affair) instead of pursuing the intimacy once created between you and your spouse.

I’ve been there.

When my husband and I married nearly 10 years ago, the newlywed bliss soon fell away, revealing deeper issues wreaking havoc on our marriage: hardships with my year-long battle with depression, stressors with limited finances, and miscommunications by each other which felt like attacks in our marriage.

All of these things drained our intimacy tanks for each other, pulling our hearts in opposite directions. We continued to think this was “just a stage” and it would “soon pass,” but it only deepened as we lacked addressing and identifying the deeper struggles going on in our hearts.

It would have ripped us apart completely; it nearly did. Yet, once we both became honest with ourselves, admitting issues going on in our marriage that we were both responsible for, it opened up the healing steps towards restoring our marriage. We began seeking help through counseling, reading marriage books together, and other things to, slowly, re-build our marriage. Through this, our relationship began to take healthy root and blossomed into something greater than we ever expected…[READ MORE]