A Marriage on Purpose

How do you explain a marriage that ends with no "obvious" reason? No affairs, abuse, financial woes--nothing that seems to be major. How do you explain that a marriage is just no more? How does that happen?

Here are a few thoughts that may be far off the mark but I have to try to make sense of it somehow. A marriage has to be lived on purpose. Everyday we have to wake up and say "I will be married today and I will be married in all the ways that means." I will put my spouse first, I will share my day with my spouse, I will respect and honor them.

It seems that some marriages start as a couple and then they have children so they become a family. Families are wonderful, but I wonder if we should rethink it and define families as a couple with children--just so we don't forget they were a couple first. As I am in the midst of the family time, I see how things could happen. Life propels us forward and we live the day instead of taking charge of the day and living our lives. In the middle of the baby and toddler years, days seemed to drag on (looking back they flew, but the hours in the day crept). Now as we are moving into teen and preteen, I can't even pretend the days aren't flying. It seems like we were just trying to decide whether the children could go to a movie alone and then we're faced with deciding on high school football games, mixers, and haunted houses. We can barely keep up with all the changes and all the places we need to be; meetings we need to attend, ball games, recitals, and on and on. There are many days when my calendar controls me instead of the other way around, then at the end of the day I don't have the energy to even ask about anyone else's day. There were no fights, no disagreements, check it off as a good day and off to bed. But I think that's where we get in trouble. We have to find the energy and make the time. It's like the saying, "don't wake a sleeping baby", but if our marriages are asleep they may never wake up.