Marriage Mondays - The First "Fight"

Hi, friends! I got the idea a few weeks ago to start a weekly series called "Marriage Mondays", partly to hold myself accountable to consistent blogging (which I miss SO much!), and partly to chronicle our first married year. 

I always loved reading about the marriages of other bloggers during my single years; it was so raw & real, and yet HEALTHY too. It inspired me as to what to look towards in a marriage of my own one day, and I'm so grateful for those bloggers sharing their lives with little ol' me. It impacted me more than I could say. 

I can't guarantee the content of these posts, mainly because I can't guarantee the content of this first year! But what I can guarantee is an authentic look into how God is moving in the marriage of PJ & A. I can guarantee a transparent view of two human beings trying to merge into one life, and the simultaneous beauty & mess that can transpire as that happens. 

And, what I can guarantee the most is the mush & the gush of how insanely grateful I am to have Philip James Cosentino as my husband. Because boy, did I marry up. ;) 

I had a total vision for this first post. It was either going to be an account of our first married date night, or a letter to single me encouraging her to be patient. Both of which likely would have detailed the flowery parts of our first {almost} month of marriage, which would have been entirely accurate because boy have there been a lot of that!

But then, life happened. And I find myself actually sitting down to blog after an incident that taught me much, and deserves to be recounted. An incident that shows that for anyone like me or PJ, with a dating past that wasn't the healthiest, there are very real consequences for that. 

I don't mean consequence in a bad way, like a punishment; I mean more of a chain-reaction series of events. Our hearts get marked by dramatic times in our lives, and even though some people can walk through break-ups without a single scar, most can't. Most of us walk out with new emotional responses to situations that we may not acknowledge until they stare us straight in the face. Like mine did last night!

I don't get mad at PJ often, and when I do, it's often my own moodiness to blame. He is so dang wonderful at being a human being, that he's hard to get mad at. Don't get me wrong, I still find ways to get frustrated. It's just usually harmless things (most of the time that don't warrant frustration), so we move onwards from it quickly.

Last night, I found myself deeply angry at my husband. I put the word fight in quotation marks in the title because it was pretty much me fighting with myself, but my level of anger felt like it warranted the description of our first fight. And my level of anger was not warranted, given what happened. It was a simple absent-minded mistake of PJ's, having to do with miscommunication, that was in no way, shape or form intended to hurt me. 

And yet it did. And instead of responding with the buckets of grace that I would have liked to, I felt like I somehow time traveled 6 years in the past to 21 year old Amy handling relationship drama. I praised Jesus for removing alcohol from my life, because being at a birthday party, things could have gotten reallll sloppy. Or at least sloppier than sober Amy made them, ha! 

I couldn't put the pin point on WHY I was so angry, I just was. I was in a state of mind that the genuine words "I'm so sorry" couldn't even penetrate. And it wasn't until later in the evening that I realized that my anger 100% was a defense mechanism. I was not angry, I was hurt. And I was not treating PJ like my loving husband whom I trust with all my heart, but like my past. Like the relationships where I never felt stable & secure as I do with him. 

I share this to show that our marriage is just like any other marriage. We are two human beings coming together, and learning more about each other every single day. We are two human beings with nearly 25 years of life lived before we even knew the other existed. We are two human beings with triggers, scars, and lessons that came out of those 25 years of living. 

BUT, we are also 2 human beings that have been bought & redeemed by the blood of Christ. We are 2 human beings that seek to live transformed lives every. single. day. We are 2 human beings that know that we need Jesus more than each other. And in a world where the divorce rate is climbing by the minute, THAT is where my hope comes from that my marriage will not add to that rate. 

I am thankful for grace this morning. PJ needed it last night, and I did too. And thankfully, God never fails to extend grace like I did last night. His mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23), and by His grace, we get to continue growing & learning how to move from the unhealthy situations of our past to the opposite. We get to take those emotional responses learned from the past, and retrain them. Because PJ is not my past, and I am not his. 

By the grace of God, we get to be each other's future. And that will have me happy dancing and raising all the praise hands into eternity.