I used to keep a blog where I would write about things that interested me. One day I wrote a post about dating, I don’t know, probably because the whole thing is really interesting, and the strangest thing happened. All of a sudden people started actually reading what I was writing (I thought people were reading before, but I was wrong).

I got e-mails that all said the same thing: Can you keep writing about dating?

So I did.

After I accidentally became a dating blogger, my platform really started to grow, not because I knew anything more about the subject than anyone else did, but because everyone else was as confused and frustrated as I was.

I was just starting the conversation.

How are we supposed to figure out this whole love thing?

The more I talked about it, the more excited I got, actually. I had been the daughter of a clinical psychologist my whole life and I actually knew some stuff that other people didn’t know. I was sharing what I had learned, asking others for help. People were talking. We were having good conversation.

Then the unthinkable happened.

This guy started commenting on my blog all the time. He was cool and smart and he always had something insightful to say. Every time he commented I would get butterflies in my stomach.

So when he asked if I would write a guest post for his blog, I said yes.

Then he asked if he could call me sometime, and I said yes.

He asked if I would come visit him in Minneapolis, I told him yes.

He asked if I would drive with him, from Minneapolis to South Florida, where he was moving to plant a church, I said yes.

He asked if I wanted to meet his family, I said yes.

He asked if he could meet mine, I said yes.

And two months after we met in person for the first time he was asking me the question every single girl has been waiting to hear: WILL YOU MARRY ME?

I said yes.

Here was the only problem. My blog was never a ploy to get a husband. A book deal, maybe, but a husband, not so much. But here he was, a gift, for me, and a really good one at that. But suddenly, there was this weight that set in. The reality of it.

It was a whole lot easier to be a single dating blogger than an engaged one.

Now I’ve been married for a whopping six months and I have a confession. I do know a lot about relationships. I’ve read books with funny titles that most people have probably never read. They’ve taught me a lot of theories and principles and ideals about what a healthy relationship should look like.

But do you know what’s more difficult than reading those books? Being a wife.

Dating doesn’t stop when you get married, and being married, I’m learning that I’m still not that good at dating.

I know a lot about dating, the way someone knows a lot about baseball, but can’t actually swing the bat.

I’m still learning what it looks like to respond to my husband, to respect him, to engage conflict when it gets hard. I’m learning about my own insecurities, which are rising to the surface in ways they never did before when I was single. I’m learning why they’re so dangerous, and so loud, and what I can do to silence them.

I still don’t have all the answers. Not by a long shot. But I have something now I didn’t have before. A few months of marriage (and counting) under my belt.

Which is why I don’t want to stop talking about dating.

I won’t write about dating every day. I want to write about other things too. But I will often write about relationships, and I hope you’ll join the conversation. I hope you’ll share your perspective and be honest with me, about all of our failures and mess-ups.

Thanks for reading. More soon.

Be content in your singleness.

This was maybe the most offered advice to me as a single person, and now that I’m married, I’m realizing how bad the advice really was. Usually it went something like this. Maybe you can relate:

“All you have to do is be content in your singleness, and love will just come to you. That’s when it happens. When you stop looking for it.”

I don’t disagree that love often comes when we least expect it, but the problem with this logic offered as advice to singles is that we all want love. All of us. We were built for it. So the only way to “be content” in our singleness is to pretend like we’re don’t want what we do want.

Faking contentedness brings more negative consequences than positive ones.

If you’re unemployed and looking for a job, no one ever tells you to “be content in your unemployed-ness. The minute you’re content, a job will just come to you.” That isn’t how in works. In fact, we’d call a person who was “content” with being unemployed lazy before we would call them self-actualized.

When you’re unemployed you want a job, and the best thing you can do is to act like a person who wants a job.

Look for a job.

When you want a job, you are a person who walks around with eyes, ears and heart open to opportunities available. You hear every conversation that includes the word “work” and see every single sign that says, “We’re hiring.”

You go to where jobs are — Craigslist, Monster, Career Builder, Linked-in, job fairs. Wherever people are looking for workers, you are there.

Build your skill set.

It’s a competitive market so you want to make yourself marketable. That doesn’t mean becoming someone you’re not. You’ll turn into a faker and no one will ever believe you (or hire you).

What it means is that you’re thinking about the skills you already have, and you’re doing the best you can with them. You’re trying to highlight your strengths and grow them. You’re thinking of your dream employer, and what they might want in an employee. You’re working to grow into that person.

Get confident in what you have to offer

You can’t fake confidence. Confidence has to be built. It takes time to build confidence, and a lot of courage. It means doing things that scare you, falling flat on your face, and getting up to try again.

Find a job that suits your needs, where you can really contribute.

You don’t settle for just any job because you’re desperate. Desperate is not the opposite of content. What you’re looking for is a job that is a good fit for you, where you can really serve your employer, and your employer can really serve you.

It’s a mutually beneficially relationship.

Take a minute to filter this metaphor through your ideas about dating. Are you approaching your dating life this way? Does it make sense that someone who is “content” with one way of life might never move to another?

Do you agree with my position or disagree?

Yesterday, I shared the first five things I wish I would have known when I was single. If you missed it, check it out HERE. Today, I’m sharing the second half of the list.

6. The habits I formed as a single person would carry into my marriage

Habits like taking care of myself before I took care of other people, like disconnecting or disengaging from people who offended me, like not engaging conflict, like carrying around bitterness, like interrupting and talking over the top of people, not telling the whole truth, choosing not to commit to any one thing, or person, for an extended period of time..

Just to name a few.

I wish I would have kicked those bad habits to the curb before I got met my husband.

7. It’s not always my fault

My biggest fear in life, single or not, has been that someone might be angry with me. I’m not sure where that comes from or if I’m alone in that, but here was my train of logic:

If someone was mad at me, I did something bad, and needed to fix it.

If someone was happy with me, I did something good, and was generally a good person.

Carry that kind of logic into marriage and you’re setting yourself up to become a really guilt-ridden, anxious, depressed, defensive, argumentative, self-protective person. It’s only when you can see that anger is less about you, and more about the angry person, that you’re able to really put your boxing gloves down to love and serve them.

8. Men leave the seat up.

But they also take the garbage out. So it’s a give and take.

9. Sex could be this good.

Okay, I’m not trying to be crude. I’m just saying. If I had known that sex in the context of marriage could be as good as it is, I wouldn’t have wasted my time with anything else.

10. Marriage isn’t as scary as I thought it was.

Sure, it’s hard some days, but mostly it’s really really good. It takes some adjustment and some figuring out but, at the end of the day, I get to work with, play with, hang out with, do life with and YES even go to bed with my very best friend.

It’s awesome.

Can you identify with any of the things I’m learning? What do you think you need to learn before you get married?

For those of you who don’t know, it wasn’t very long ago that I was single, writing to a bunch of other people about what it was like to be single. Now that I’m married I don’t want to stop writing to singles. In fact, I think I might even have something more valuable to share.

I definitely don’t have it all figured out. Not even close. But I can tell you what I’m learning.

There are quite a few things I wish I would have known before I was married. I’ll share five with you today, and five tomorrow so stay tuned for the rest of the list.

1. That “hooking up” would come back to haunt me

There is no such thing as a “meaningless” hook-up. There are no free passes. By the grace of God I have found forgiveness and freedom and healing, but healing takes time. Lots of time. I wish I would have stopped messing around much sooner than I did.

2. A husband wouldn’t fix the way I felt about myself.

I was really insecure about the way I looked, and about what I was capable of doing, so I spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince everyone that I could do everything on my own and that I didn’t need anyone.

I also spent a lot of time exercising and “eating healthy” and worrying about my body.

The thing I found about being married is that marriage, or a husband, or a husband’s husband’s affirmations haven’t cured me of my insecurity. In fact, just his simple presence (despite affirmations) tend to make those insecurities more pronounced. I wish I would have faced my insecurity, and dealt with it, while I was still single.

3. My sin really hurts people

When I was single I used to think my sin was just a private issue that I could deal with on my own. You know, as it was convenient for me. I knew I had sin, but we all had sin, right? I was working on it, getting around to it.

It wasn’t anyone else’s business really.

What I’ve found in marriage is that my sin is not just my own business but that it hurts anyone and everyone who is around me. With this understanding I approach my sin with a much more dramatic sense of urgency. I wish I would have known that when I was single. I could have spared myself and others.

4. I am responsible for my own spiritual life (and the rest of my life for that matter)

To be fair, I had a fairly thriving spiritual life before I met my husband. I read and studied the bible daily. I prayed. I was closely connected to a small group of other believers in intentional community. I attended worship services at my church on weekends.

But I think I had this idea that, once I met my husband, I could just let my guard down.

I think I thought, “Okay, that’s it. We’re getting married. Go ahead. Lead me.”

The truth is my husband is a strong man of God and a really incredible leader. He leads me spiritually in many ways. But marriage is maybe the worst time in life to throw up your hands and give up the good fight for your spiritually vitality.

In fact, in marriage, more than any other place in life, I’ve needed my own personal connection to the Lord to help inform me, heal me and minister to me so that I have what it takes to even “show up” as a wife.

(And, heaven forbid, to at times lead my husband.)

5. I didn’t need to try so hard to “get” someone to love me

I spent nearly twenty years of my life laboring for 40 minutes each morning, blow drying and flat-ironing my hair. In fact, I’ve added it up and discovered that I could have potentially spent over 3,000 hours making my hair look the way I thought a man wanted.

You know what my husband said the first time my hair naturally curly?

He said, “I like your hair better that way. You should wear it like that more often.”

Am I the only one who had to learn these lessons? Any thoughts you want to add to my list?

Darrell and I are in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for the weekend for our sister-in-law’s graduation, which meant we got to revisit the early days of our relationship with a road trip.

I don’t know about you but I LOVE road trips. Especially when I get to take them with my favorite person.

Thought I’d share a few fun photos from our trip. Don’t mind the double toilet and boiled peanuts. Apparently that’s par for the course for rest stops in the south. Don’t ask questions..

 

 

What about you? What do you think of road trips? Or how about boiled peanuts?

Any ideas about a useful application of the double toilet?

All thoughts and opinions welcome here.

When my husband and I first met and were talking about dating, we used to use the analogy of “taking the leap” all the time.

Part of it was that we met online, which is different for a guy, by the way, than it is for a girl. A dude says, “Hey,I met this hot girl online and she’s coming to see me…” and suddenly all of his friends are fighting over who gets to give him the first high five.

A girl, on the other hand, hunkers down over a cup of coffee with friends, her mom, her sister, and breaks the news, “I met this guy on the Internet and he seems really nice and now he wants to meet me…”

Cue: RED FLAGS everywhere.

In addition to that, we had both lived pretty rebellious lives in the years before we met each other, which by default meant that we had all kinds of extra baggage to bring into the picture — broken relationships, broken hearts, and just plain insecurity.

You get the idea.

Add that to the fact that we were both in our late twenties (which had given plenty of time for the baggage to build up)…

And that relationships are scary anyway….

And there was just no getting around it. Starting a new relationship felt like a big risk.

We were both afraid.

So when he invited me to Minneapolis (I was in Portland, OR at the time) to come and meet him for the first time, I told him that I felt like this was a big leap for us. The day he purchased my plane ticket I sent him a video of me jumping off of a 40 foot waterfall.

I had been in Costa Rica for a post-graduation vacation, and was standing on the edge of a rock that jettisoned out over the top of a jet stream of water. The waterfall cascaded to a giant open swimming hole below.

I had watched several others jump first and I figured that this was one of those things that, you know, you have to do when you come to Costa Rica.

I was pretty sure I didn’t have a choice.

So I stood on the rock and asked some random tourist to take a video.

If you listen to the video you can hear me say, just before I jump, “I don’t want to die, I just don’t want to die.”

You can everyone else yelling, “DO IT! DO IT!”

“This is how I feel right now,” I told him, over online chat.

“Do it, do it.” is all he typed back.

I did do it, by the way, and never for one second have I regretted taking the leap. In the nearly 10 months since we met, got married and moved our whole lives across the country to West Palm Beach, Florida, I haven’t looked back.

What an exhilarating, exciting, terrifying ride it’s been.

There’s only one problem.

Our analogy is breaking down.

See, after just five months of marriage we’re starting to realize that “taking the leap” isn’t something that happens just once, and then you’re done. Sure, you take one of the biggest “leaps” of your life on your wedding day. But it isn’t like, after that, your relationship just stops being scary.

I think being married is more like bungee jumping.

That first big leap is important. You stand in front of your family and friends and say, “This is it. I’m committing my whole life to this person, forever. Even when he’s sick, or I’m sick, or he’s poor, or I’m poor… I’m in this thing. I’m not going anywhere.”
And yes, marriage is a big commitment. You can’t take it lightly. In fact, if you don’t leave the ground with both feet, at the same time, you’re in danger of really hurting yourself.

You might smack your face on the side of a bridge or something.

But when it comes to marriage I’m finding that the leaping doesn’t stop after the wedding day. In fact, I’m starting to notice, now that I’ve been married for a few months, that there’s this whip-lash, this pull-back, this sense when it comes to your relationship you don’t just leap once and get it over with.

It takes more than that.

There are days when I still feel afraid to let my husband in, to let him close. I worry that if he knows what I’m thinking, or what I’m feeling, he might ridicule me or dismiss me or use it against me in a fight someday. So I push him away.

I can (really easily) blame this on past experiences, or on my natural human fear of intimacy. I could even blame it on my husband himself.

None of that would be far-fetched. But none of it would get me anywhere.

My only other option is to take the opportunity to learn what so many long-time married couples have learned already, which is what it looks like to “take the leap” and then let yourself fall into love, and into each other, over and over and over again.

According to Wikipedia, bungee jumping is “an activity that involves jumping from a tall structure while connected to a large elastic chord. The thrill comes as much from the free falling as from the rebounds.”

The thrill is as much in the free-falling as it is in the rebound.

I wasn’t expecting that.

But it actually sounds kind of fun.

Are you married? How have you learned to fall for your spouse again and again? Anyone want to go Bungee Jumping?