When Marriage Gets Hard….Fight Harder

Have you ever been to that point where you were just done….with everything? Hit your breaking point and wanted to throw in the towel?

I had drawn a line in the sand and said “I’m done.” and I walked away. Not even one year into our marriage, I walked out. I told him I couldn’t do this anymore, packed my things up and left.

Let me give you a little backstory……Billy and I started dating my freshman year in high school. We clicked instantly and were inseparable right from the start. I knew he was the one really early on in the relationship. We did everything together and when we weren’t together, we had a phone attached to our ears. We dating for 6 years in high school and college and got married in our early 20’s. Things were going really great until we allowed things in our lives to take priority over our relationship.

Billy LOVED wrestling! He has since he was a kid. We had went to a couple indy shows in Missouri and it was there that Billy had come in contact with some guys that he would start training with. He had natural talent and was REALLY good. But the more he saw stardom knocking on his door, the more focused on wrestling he became and did whatever it would take to make him famous. While he was pushing for stardom, he was pushing me out of his life without even realizing it. It was here that I felt lonely, invaluable and rejected. And when you’re in that place you can do some really dumb things. You just want to feel like you matter.

Wrestling Feds are really like big families and we had developed some great friends in that family. But one of those friends we had developed became my confidant. The one I talked to almost daily about my issues. He listened, tried to give me advise, but more importantly: he paid attention to me. We talked ALOT. It was in this relationship that I decided that I deserved better for myself and I officially gave up on my marriage.

This part of our story is difficult for me. A lot of emotions ran through the months that came ahead. I hurt a lot of people around me but it was my youth and naive thoughts that was driving my decisions and I was only thinking about myself. My heart had hardened towards my husband to the point where I thought it was unrepairable.

He tried to get me to go to counseling which I refused. He tried everything he could think of to get me to change my mind (love notes, flowers, sweet text messages….) but I was done and didn’t want to try to make our marriage work but God was behind the scenes working up a plan far greater than our own.

While I was away being angry at Him, He was begging God for mercy. He was praying for restoration and having a real God changing moment in His life.

In a night of brokenness, God spoke to Billy. Told him that in order to fix our relationship, he had to fix his relationship with God first.

We were separated for almost 2 months before I slowly began answering his phone calls and text messages. I started accepted his invitations for dinners and movies. We began to date again.

God really does work in ways we don’t understand. Back then I would of never imagined that God being the center of our relationship would fix our marriage. That looking to the cross instead of the situation would somehow heal those deep wounds. And the amazing thing about it is that God was using Billy’s restoration of faith to create my relationship with Him. Billy started being the leader in our house. He was making God a priority in our lives and through that I eventually gave my heart to God and made Him a priority in MY life.

When we put God before our spouse, He does something incredible. He takes the focus off of what they aren’t and puts the focus on who He is. I began to see Billy in a whole new light. I remember asking these questions to myself one night while we were on a date, “was he always like this and I missed it?” “Am I that self absorbed that I missed this incredible man in front of me?”

It wasn’t an easy fix. We had a lot of work to do on our marriage. It took months to get back to the place where we trusted each other again. And we still have to work on our marriage, Everyday.

But we must put God within those relationships, if they are going to be the way God intended them to be. That was the issue with our marriage in the beginning….God wasn’t the center of it. And when we begin to have issues in our marriage, we realize that we’ve taken God out of the center and we’re been doing the marriage thing on our own.

I hope that through our story, God can save a marriage. That He can bring hope to those who are struggling and see that when we find God, we find ourselves and the path he has for our relationships and our lives.