Recently, one of our sweet couples celebrated their one year anniversary! We asked them how their first year of marriage went, and they shared with us some wise words and important lessons that they learned this past year.
RP: What’s the biggest lesson you have learned in your first year of marriage?
Tina+JP: One big discovery is the importance of keeping an open mind to each other’s ideas and working as a team. Not so much a “lesson learned” but something that can take effort… the ability to HEAR the other person and MAKE a mutual decision that you are both at peace with and realizing without ego/frustration that your partners idea was better than yours!
Also we “discovered” that the wants/needs of the individual and those things that are important to that person become a mutual want/desire. The important ‘thing’ to that individual is now important to you… we realized this more and more (especially as we built a life and home together).
RP: What’s one piece of advice you would give yourselves if you could go back and plan your wedding again?
Tina+JP: NO regrets! My advice would be do what YOU want. If it’s keeping it small, keep it small, if the desire is to have a big wedding, then go big! Luckily for us, we both wanted small, private, and outdoors with just us, parents/siblings, and our pastor! Then we big party a few months later. Best decision ever! We were able to take our time, and can remember EVERY detail of the best day ever 🙂
RP: What is one thing you have done this past year to build a strong foundation of marriage?
Tina+JP: This is super gushy, but every morning when we wake up, we spend time snuggling before starting the day and out loud and thank God for a wonderful husband/wonderful wife. This was advice from Jason’s late grandfather who was married >60 years… pretty solid advice!
Thanks for sharing these reflections with us, Tina and JP! We hope year 2 is just as good as year 1 was!
