Growth Rate

By this point in your life, you have habits. You like your coffee a certain way, you like your shower a certain length, and you like to have certain parts of the house cleaner than others. Marriage can be a sledgehammer to your trophy case of habits. My husband is a "constant-cleaner". This means that he will pick up plates when he's done with them, put away books after he reads them, etc. I am a "blitzkrieg-cleaner". I love the transformation between hoarder's paradise to organizational dream. I actually watch the Hoarders TV show while I clean for motivation.

NOT my house.

This causes some "discussions" on a pretty regular basis, but we're both coming to a sort of middle ground. I am more often picking up things right after I use them, and I clean my car out once every 2 weeks rather than once every 2 months.
I recently began to get discouraged. Not only was I struggling to adjust to the new method of cleaning (arguably much better than my own), I felt like we were not where we needed to be in our marriage. We were not superheroes of marital bliss.

We went over to a new friend's house, where she introduced us to her baby. The baby happened to be born on our wedding weekend, so she held him up and laughed, "This is how old your marriage is!" That's when I realized it. At that point, our marriage could not even hold its head up! Any time I get discouraged now, I look up a picture of a child as old as our marriage. We can't even walk. We don't know how to say "Thank you." We can laugh, we can survive little tumbles, and we can cuddle like nobody's business.

9 months old

 Be encouraged! My friend Emma gave me a mantra to get me through the first bit: "Grace for him, grace for me." I can't tell you how many times I said that phrase. "You're both new at marriage," she said, "Give yourselves a break!" So no matter how many times you fight about the location of the coat rack or the temperature of the house, chill out. You'll get the hang of it.

--Caroline