The first year of marriage was the toughest for my husband and me. I had just moved to Kentucky, the place where he was employed, after 23 years of living in New York. I was homesick for my family, I was homesick for my friends, and I was in the throes of depression (or little did I know at the time it was bipolar disorder).

It was difficult to adjust to living with a new person after having lived at home with my parents and grandma for years. He had a completely different culture and different habits than what I grew up with. This made for an interesting clash.

It wasn’t just difficult but it was… different. He grew up on pasta and mashed potatoes, and I grew up on rice and beans. He wanted a clean dining room table, and I had a stack of papers that always covered the table.

After 2 years of arguments, fighting, and a hospitalization for depression on my end, things got better. We settled into an easy routine of working together, compromising, and learning each other’s habits.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that marriage is not easy, that you have to work at it. For the first two years, I found that to be true. My husband could have easily walked away from me. I had nights where I thought about driving home or driving anywhere to be away from him. (In fact, I did try that one night but I got lost and everything was dark and scary so I turned right around and went home.)

But love is a choice. And I’ve learned that every day, we must choose to love each other. That’s what makes a marriage work. The dependence on my “feelings” of love left long ago. Now, I wake up choosing to love this man who also chooses to love me. We do not fight often, but we do not have a perfect marriage. We get annoyed with each other at times. But we work through it. If I go to bed upset, I usually wake forgetting what I was upset about.

Perhaps that is also the key to a good marriage: a poor memory.

I enjoy my marriage. I cannot imagine being married to anyone else who would treat me as well as my husband does. This is not a post to extol his virtues, but rather to praise the blessings God has heaped upon our marriage. In spite of our differences, we have been able to work together as a team, as partners, to make this unlikely marriage succeed.

I hope I’m not speaking too early or out of turn. We’ve only been married seven years, but I look forward to being married for seventy-seven more.