Marriage Monday: Introduction & The Five Love Languages

Hello!  The Blooming Hydrangea is beginning a new weekly series this week entitled “Marriage Mondays”.  We (more on this in a minute) are so excited to bring you a weekly blog post involving all things related to marriages, and it is our hope that your marriages (or soon-to-be marriages) are blessed as you learn and laugh with us.  We have felt a strong calling to talk about marriages because we have been richly blessed with an amazing one, but we know that there are many out there who have struggling marriages or have already been divorced and have felt the pain in this area of life.  Certainly our culture doesn’t make things any easier in this area, and the pain of divorce weighs heavy in almost everyone’s life at one point or another. either through your own experience of those of friends and/or famiy.    But it is our hope that you can find true JOY in your marriage, and that we can help you out just a little with our series.

On the subject of “we”, these posts will be co-authored by Ange of course and joined by husband Alex (whom you may previously only know as “The Blooming Hubs”) for a dual approach to this subject.  After all it takes both of us to make our marriage work, so talking about it should involve both of us as well so we can each represent our own sides of the story.

And along the way we’ll be opening up the lines of communication with all of you and  allow you to submit questions (either publicly or privately if you wish to remain anonymous) for us to answer, directed to either Ange, Alex, or both of us.  When we communicate in these posts we will use colors to differentiate who is talking so that you can know which perspective you are getting.  In honor of the “Blue and Pink” alluded  to by Love and Respect Ministries, we will use those colors to represent us so Ange will post her comments in Pink and Alex will post in Blue.

So let’s start by sharing a bit with you where we started from so you can know a bit more about our marriage.  We have been together for nearly 18 years (wow, has it been that long?? Makes me feel old)(ummm, no comment?)  and married for nearly 14.  We met in high school in our senior year and both knew right away that we had something special, although it took a few weeks for us to get our relationship going (Ange will quickly remind you that SHE was the one who had to call me for the first date and if she hadn’t she’d still be waiting!!).  (If you don’t know this already babe, I am kind of quick to act on things, when I like something, I go for it!)   Right after high school we were engaged, and married towards the end of college.

 

Within 6 months of our marriage, we said goodbye to our mutual home town and moved away on our own to our neighboring state where Alex started a new job out of school.  Soon after, children came into the picture (four in all from 2001 to 2009) and just last year we uprooted our now family of six and moved to another state.

As far as our marriage goes, we have had our share of ups and downs, but overall we feel that we get along great and are in the process of making our marriage something really special.  Neither of us really knew what marriage was all about when we first started (who does really?) but we have taken our vows seriously and grown even closer today then we were when we started.  We have been careful to not let life get in the way of our marriage, not even allowing the blessings of children to interfere with our relationship with each other.  A few years into our marriage we watched the Love and Respect videos together with a small group and our marriage has really been transformed from that experience.  It helped us really make sense out of our disagreements and work towards unity in a way we hadn’t been able to do before.  Since that time we have helped share the Love and Respect message with many couples from our church as well as dozens of couples with some local marriage conferences we helped organize.  We have seen firsthand the transformative power of those videos on marriages, (check out this blog post)  making nearly hopeless marriages able to survive and making so-so marriages into great ones.  We will draw on some of that material as we present this series.

We would love to hear from you, maybe you have a question or two that we can TRY to answer?  Any topics of interest you’d like us to make sure we cover in this series?  Please give us your feedback so that we can tailor this series to your liking!  Email us and we promise that these questions will remain anonymous on the blog and kept in the strictest of confidence!

Next week we’ll be talking about the book The Five Love Languages by Dr. Gary Chapman.  Many of you maybe familiar with this book and we are going to encourage you to read it again to freshen up on your love language skills.  If you have never read this book before, ask around and see if you can borrow a copy from your friends, your church or the library.   It’s sometimes at Wal-mart for around $5. Your homework for next week is to find a copy of this book.

 

Then head over to this link and take the 5 Love Languages quiz, please take the quiz even if you’ve done it before, you might be surprised by your answers.  If your spouse is willing, have them take the quiz as well and hopefully this will stir up some good conversation between the two of you.  We will be back next week to talk more about the Five Love Languages.
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