Marriage retreating
barlow_girl and I are just outside of Poulsbo, WA, staying at the Green Cat Guest House for a couple of days after attending our friends' Santino & Alica's wedding Sunday evening. As we discovered last year, Sunday evening weddings are always so much more enjoyable when we can take a couple of days of downtime together afterward. It's been so good to slow down, explore, talk, and get our bearings a bit for whatever the road ahead might bring.
It's a great time to do that since, among other things, we're moving this month! We'll be settling into a house (rental-we didn't get rich or anything) just a few blocks up the street over the course of July, which will also involve lots of painting, etc. We're excited about the new place as well as the opportunity to make a new home together-when we married, Amy moved into my apartment, and while it's been great, this will be the first place that's "ours" from beginning to end, warts and all. It's also about double the space (from around 700 square feet to around 1400), which should make the moving process a lot simpler. We don't want to be in anything ginormous, though-this seems really extravagant to us-so we'll see how it goes.
There's a lot more to being on the same page than simple logistics, though. I wonder if the "marriage retreat" industry is fueled by the fact that so many couples don't-don't slow down, don't get away, don't talk together about what they value, where their life together is headed, what the vision, mission, and purpose of their marriage is. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with getting a helping hand from a retreat others set up for us, but couples need to take responsibility for caring for one another and their marriages, even in stumbling steps with big risks and regular failures. It's not easy to own our own marital "agendas," and it can be pretty tough to even wrap our hearts and minds around the hugeness of it sometimes, but really, it's our work to do together and it's worth bucking up and doing.
It's a great time to do that since, among other things, we're moving this month! We'll be settling into a house (rental-we didn't get rich or anything) just a few blocks up the street over the course of July, which will also involve lots of painting, etc. We're excited about the new place as well as the opportunity to make a new home together-when we married, Amy moved into my apartment, and while it's been great, this will be the first place that's "ours" from beginning to end, warts and all. It's also about double the space (from around 700 square feet to around 1400), which should make the moving process a lot simpler. We don't want to be in anything ginormous, though-this seems really extravagant to us-so we'll see how it goes.
There's a lot more to being on the same page than simple logistics, though. I wonder if the "marriage retreat" industry is fueled by the fact that so many couples don't-don't slow down, don't get away, don't talk together about what they value, where their life together is headed, what the vision, mission, and purpose of their marriage is. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with getting a helping hand from a retreat others set up for us, but couples need to take responsibility for caring for one another and their marriages, even in stumbling steps with big risks and regular failures. It's not easy to own our own marital "agendas," and it can be pretty tough to even wrap our hearts and minds around the hugeness of it sometimes, but really, it's our work to do together and it's worth bucking up and doing.