I promised, on our wedding day, to love Daniel in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer. I meant every word. I also had almost no idea yet what most of those seasons would actually require of me, because you cannot know a marriage from the outside of one.
What I did not know was how much of marriage is not the big dramatic vows but the accumulation of small, unglamorous choices — choosing to speak kindly at the end of an exhausting day, choosing to assume the best when a text sounds curt, choosing to stay curious about a person you already think you know completely.
Solomon’s wisdom about two being better than one was never romantic language to begin with — it is practical, almost businesslike: if one falls, the other lifts him up (Ecclesiastes 4:10). That has been truer of our marriage than any poem I read before I was married. Some seasons I have been the one falling. Some seasons it has been Daniel. The marriage holds because we keep taking turns doing the lifting.
If I could tell my bride-self anything, it would be this: the marriage you are imagining right now is a beautiful sketch. The real one will be less polished and far more sturdy than you can picture — built one ordinary Tuesday of choosing each other at a time.