Thursday, January 3, 2013

Love Dare: Intro

                          Our wedding day November 11, 2006

One of my 2013 goals is to read 7+ Christian based marriage books. The first book I am reading is The Love Dare. It was featured in the movie Fireproof, which by the way is an AWESOME movie. I want the fairy tale marriage and we are getting there but that has not always been the case.

We met horseback riding in 2004. We became inseparable from day 1. As from what I have been told by several people is common in military relationships, we moved fast... VERY FAST. By January 2005, we were engaged. We set our date for that June, but it fell through. After becoming injured, he was released from active duty in August. We moved back to my hometown just a week later and set a new date. We were financially unstable and soon debt began to take over. Less that 4 months after we got married, we got pregnant and miscarried and repeated this trend several times. We both became depressed and stressed and things became tense. Dave and I both have strong personalities. 

He needed his space and I needed mine. We needed to unwind and forget our problems. He began hanging with "friends" who I didn't trust and wanted nothing to do with. I began to run with some coworkers (who were like family). We never spent time together. Things were in a rapid down spiral. In January 2008, a fight went too far and I moved back home with my parents. His "friends" were there for him and my friends were there for me. 

I became more emotional than normal and would wake up feeling ill. One day my close friend pointed out "Hey Genius, you are pregnant!" Boy was she right! What to I had filed for a divorce that he didn't want and here we are having a baby! I didn't want him to have a broken home and Dave wasn't ready to give up on me. We did eventually compromise. He dropped those "friends" after they cause damage that took years (literally years) to fix and I moved home. As much as we tried things weren't the same. 

Over the years, things have gotten better. But there still is a lot of struggles. This is 6 years and 3 kids later. We want to establish a relationship our children can be proud of and model the kind of relationship that we want them to have. You can't and shouldn't change the one you love, but you sure can change yourself and that will make an impact so big that your partner will change without noticing. 

I will be tracking our progress over the next 40 days! I will be open and honest and probably sometimes too honest. I am going to blog journal style when it comes to these posts. The purpose of tracking this is 1. for me to look at how far we will come (I hope) and 2. to share any insight I gain in hopes that it will help someone who needs it.


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