Marriage Monday: Help A Brother Out

[Note: This WAS mostly written on Monday, but now it's Wednesday, and I can only blame my 10 minute breaks on the delay. We'll start planning earlier for next week!]

A marriage is a partnership. A team. The best way to picture a functioning, equally dedicated marriage is like a forward-moving rowboat: each passenger working together to ensure their strokes are in step, pulling with equal vigour, lest the boat take a turn right or left and end up moving in circles. Each passenger must agree to be 100% dedicated to the cause of moving the boat forward, because this simply doesn't happen by accident.

Now, we all know the importance of helping one another in marriage. (If you don't: it's important to help your spouse, to be their helper.) Whether we practice that with dedication or not is up to us to reflect on, but the principle of helping our spouse hasn't changed. If you see that your partner could use a hand, it should be in your duty and desire to lend it to them. But that's not really the point of today's post.

This Monday, John and I want to share with you the importance of letting your partner help you.

I don't know about you, but I'd consider myself a fairly independent person. In life, this has been a benefit for me: I don't need to wait for a wingman to go to the gym, I don't require approval for outfit choices (OK, maybe that's not a benefit!), I'm happy to join a class where I don't know anyone... In general, I've always been alright on my own. But despite the fact that "life" rewards the independents, marriage doesn't - that's not how it was designed.

In the first year of our marriage, I learned that my tendency towards an independent attitude
didn't have a place in our day to day activities. This doesn't mean we didn't enjoy our own friends or independent experiences, but for me to decide I could do things on my own - and vice versa - defeated the purpose of marriage as a partnership. Now, 13 days into life with our newborn, I'm more than thankful I learned to accept John's help earlier on: We learned to form better habits of partnership and now more than ever need to call on them just to get through the day.

There are so many things in life (with or without baby) we just shouldn't need to do on our own, and as long as we have a partner who values our partnership equally, we may not need to. But in order to get there, us independents need to drop the habit and allow our spouse to fill in the gaps where we can't. Help your spouse by allowing them to help you.