25 Lessons for Young Men from 25 Years of Marriage

This week Lauren and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary.  I can honestly say that I love my wife and delight in her more than ever.  She is my best friend and the greatest gift God has given me on this earth.  Many have told me how lucky I am.  And I don't disagree, especially when you mean by lucky what the Psalmist meant by "blessed" - I have received what I have not deserved.  I never imagined as a teenager that my life would be so full and so blessed and I claim no credit for the lucky state in which I find myself.  What little wisdom I have discovered and exercised has been given to me by a gracious God who has protected me from my lack of wisdom more times than I can count or want to know.

So, in honor of this Silver Anniversary, I thought I would share a little of the wisdom I have gleaned in 25 years of marriage with young dudes who are just starting their marriage journey.  Everyone likes lists, so I think I will give you 25 points to ponder in absolutely no logical order.  May you experience the full and unbridled blessing of grace in your marriages - for your joy and for God's glory!

1. Oneness is the point of marriage.  What is oneness?  It is the gift of God to us in the covenant of marriage  (Genesis 2:24).  It is the losing of "me" in "us" - learning to put your wife's needs and desires ahead of your own, not because you are honorable or self-disciplined, but because you love her so much that her happiness is your happiness.

2. Oneness is better than sex and what makes sex better with time.  If you are newly married, you may be wondering if anything can be better than sex.  Especially if you and your wife have great chemistry and you are enjoying the freedom of being given the "keys to the kingdom."  Believe it or not, sex itself can get kind of old - even boring - or worse, frustrating and devaluing.  When that happens, our culture says the spark is gone and you just need to seek out new territory to conquer.  Don't buy in to the world's lie that good sex is reserved for the young and passionate or the old and degenerate.  The best sex, like the finest wine, comes with careful cultivation and wise care of what is truly important: the pursuit of becoming emotionally and spiritually one.

3. Love Jesus more than you love your wife and family.  I remember someone gave me this advice and I had no idea what it even meant.  "Don't make an idol out of your wife or family - don't put them before God," they said.  I thought that advice made sense, but I didn't know how to follow it.  How do you measure love?  How do you know if you are loving God enough or your wife too much?  Here is my answer: don't worry about if you love your wife too much.  You don't. And you can't.  But you can love God too little.  Stay in the word.  Develop a regular habit of prayer.  Be serious about your relationship with Jesus.  Be involved in your local church, serving with your gifts.  If you keep your love for God alive and vibrant, he will sanctify your love for you wife.

4. Gratitude is more powerful to change things than grumbling.  That sounds like preacher talk, and it is.  But, like the best preacher talk, it puts a powerful idea in a simple form.  You can choose daily what you will focus on - the stuff that annoys you, frustrates you, disappoints you - or the stuff for which you should be thankful (even if at the moment you don't feel thankful).  Be thankful for the gift of your wife even when the relationship is hard.  Be thankful for her body and her affection even when (especially when) you are tempted to look elsewhere or you are in a difficult season sexually (like when you have kids!).  Gratitude unleashes grace in your relationship, and there is no more powerful force of change and joy than grace.  Grumbling on the other hand sucks all the grace and all the joy out of the relationship and will leave you with nothing but struggle.  Choose gratitude.

5. Learn to celebrate well.  Everyone loves to be celebrated - even introverts who love to stay in the shadows and not in the limelight.  The key is to know how they like to be celebrated - because not everyone likes to be celebrated in the same way.  You should be an expert in how your wife likes to be celebrated, and you should be her chief cheerleader.

6. Confess your mistakes and ask for grace and forgiveness.  You need it, so ask for it.  You will fail.  You will be weak when you should have been strong.  You will be selfish when you could have been selfless.  You will say the wrong thing or even the hurtful thing when you could have spoken words of grace.  Mercilessly break your pride.  Confess where you fall short - when you hurt your wife or fail her - and ask her for grace and forgiveness.  By asking, you are leading your wife to the throne of grace and asking God to unleash the power of his redemptive work in your relationship.  By hardening your heart, focusing on her faults, and refusing to admit your failures, you are setting yourself (and, sadly, your family) up for a fall.

7. Don't drink out of the milk jug.  Or do, if it doesn't bother your wife.  The key here is to know what social behaviors please your wife or get under her skin.  You're not a bachelor anymore.  You don't live alone and as part of a community, value your wife's expectations and desires - at home, in restaurants, in family settings - wherever.  Politeness is an expression of love.

8. Protect your wife's reputation.  We all have frustrations and disappointments with our wives (just like they do with us). The place to talk about those things is with our wives, not our buddies at the local bar (or our mothers!).  Your wife is your treasure - and you don't want people disrespecting your treasure.  Protect her reputation.  Don't talk about your sex life (or the lack of it) or your fights or her quirks.  Your wife should feel absolutely safe with you - even when you are aren't with her and are hanging out with your friends or with your family.

9. Give grace (and forgiveness) without being asked.  Leadership in the home has much less to do with being the boss and making decisions than it does with setting the tone and being like Jesus.  This means that you need to foster a habit of quick forgiveness and a posture of grace (instead of the occasional gesture of grace).  Be the first to confess and the first to forgive.  By doing so, you invite trust, intimacy, and vulnerability, all necessary traits of pursuing oneness.

10. Make your wife feel beautiful (and sexy).  Read Proverbs 5.  Seriously, click that link and read it right now.  Now follow its advice by making a choice: decide that your wife is your measure of beauty.  You will not compare her to others to see how she measures up.  Do not decide how she should or could change to please you.  Her body is yours (and your body is hers) - do not defraud her by letting your affections be led astray by adulterous fantasy.  If she is skinny - you are into skinny.  If she is curvy - you are into curvy. Love her body and she will learn to feel beautiful and to feel sexy, things that are probably not natural or easy for her.  You will both benefit.

11. Commit not-so-random acts of kindness and service.  Make it a habit of doing kind things for your wife, things that have no purpose other than to give her joy or to express your love.  Don't just do nice things when you have had a fight (like showing up with flowers in the evening after a verbal throw down in the morning).  That will come off as manipulative and self-serving (probably because it is).  Do kind things, serve her in helpful and simple ways, daily.  It helps kill your selfish need to be first and communicates value and love to your wife.

12. Lead spiritually.  The Bible makes it clear that men were created to lead their homes.  This doesn't mean that you should make all the decisions or be the "boss man" of the home.  We aren't talking about a neanderthal masculinity.  To lead means to be "like Christ" - to lay down your life for the good of your wife and family.  It means you work hard at becoming the man God has created you to be by grace and in grace.  It means that you take responsibility for your areas of weakness and seek to grow.  It means that you learn to hate self-pity, blame shifting, self-righteous anger, cowardice, and anything else that will rob you of the strength of being like Jesus and learn to love God's grace.

13. Find a Mentor.  If you have a godly, engaged father, you are blessed with a mentor already.  You are also an exception.  Most of us have to be intentional in the pursuit of a mentor, someone older and wiser who will speak with love and care into our lives.  Someone who is not overly impressed with us but can also see the potential in us.  Someone who will give us life advice, share where they have failed or succeeded, and will speak into our development as men.  Remember that good men tend to be busy men, so be willing to invest in your mentor (by doing tasks with him or serving him in other ways) as he invests in you.

 14. Find confidants, not just buddies.  Guys like buddies - they are easy to hang out with, easy to talk to, easy to do things with - because they like the topics we like and like to do the things we like to do.  Confidants, on the other hand, are guys we not only like but respect.  These are men we trust and are mature enough to speak into our lives and our struggles.  Where mentors act like a coach on the sidelines, a confidant is a guy fighting next to us in the trenches.  These are guys who will listen to you confess, will call you to be and do your best, and will rebuke you when you complain or go to tap out.  They are trustworthy friends who know you and are committed to your growth spiritually and emotionally.  They are rare and worth fighting to get and keep.  Your marriage will be better when you have men fighting with you to help you become a better man.

15. Foster godly ambition.  Your wife longs for you to know her and delight in her - but she also wants to respect you.  She can (and should) give you the gift of respect out of grace and to honor Christ, but you should also work to develop the character, work ethic, and drive that call out respect.  A godly ambition isn't about getting ahead of neighbors or securing a lake house and a boat or even about money.  It is about having goals that are worth pursuing and then working for them.  It is about stretching yourself to achieve something worth achieving - something that flows out of your shared values.  It might be in business.  It might be in ministry.  It might be in art or science.  Clarify your values, set goals, and go get them.

16. Always put the toilet seat down and replace the toilet paper.  Seriously, do you think your lady appreciates it when she uses the restroom in the middle of the night, half asleep, only to almost fall into the toilet because the seat is up?  Only then to discover that you left an empty roll on the dispenser?  Every day, it's the little things that say, "I love you and value you" or "I love myself and don't really think about you." Pay attention to the little things in order to communicate the big thing: that you love your wife and want her to feel valued.

17. Love her family.  Often our wives have very tight (and very complicated) relationships with their families - and it means the world to them when we love her family without critique or reservation.  She may vent or complain at points about her family.  Let her.  Listen to her.  But don't join her.

18.  Develop shared interests and hobbies.  The saying goes, "The couple that plays together, stays together."  That may be an oversimplification, but it has a lot of truth in it.  Don't insist that she adopt all of your hobbies - stretch yourself to pick up some of hers.  You may like extreme sports and she may like bird watching.  Believe it or not, you can actually start to enjoy looking at birds.  But it will mean learning a bit about it and investing into it.  In the end, you will both benefit as you increase the ways you share joy together.  

19. Stop looking at porn.  Some guys enter marriage with a raging porn addiction (often hidden) that they think will go away once they are married and "can have sex whenever they feel like it."  It doesn't take long for these guys to be deeply disappointed.  Porn destroys intimacy because it ruins your ability to see and appreciate your wife, distorts your expectations about what sex is and should be like, and plants discontent in your heart.  Oh, and it's also sin and equivalent to adultery.  Don't despair (I can't break free) or cop out (It's impossible to break free, so why try?).  The addiction can be beaten and freedom is possible in the power of the gospel and in community - but it will take humility, confession, repentance, and a renewed passion for the God of grace.

20. Grow in your endurance of discomfort.  If you have ever trained for anything (scholastic or athletic), you already know that training requires you to increase your endurance of discomfort.  There is a good kind of suffering that comes from stretching for something you cannot yet attain, but will be able to soon.  In marriage, you need to grow in your ability to endure a wide range of discomforts - emotional, physical, financial - without curling up in the fetal position in the corner and giving up.  Choose to inconvenience yourself daily.  Not in horrible, self-abusive ways - but in little things that allow you to put other people first, while reminding yourself that Jesus suffered to put you first.  There is a deep strength that can grow from these simple habits.

21.  Don't be sarcastic.  Sarcasm pointed at your wife is bitterness wrapped in passive-aggression.  It is self-pity and pride hiding behind a grim humor that neither entertains nor gives life.  Words hurt and real men love and protect their wives from pain.

22. Never, ever stop studying your wife.  You should be the foremost expert on your wife - what she likes to eat, her favorite color, her love language (how she most effectively gives and receives love), her insecurities, her hopes.  Use a notebook.  Review it and modify it as you learn more.  She is a treasure with layers and layers of beauty, and it takes a lifetime to truly know someone.  

23. Clarify expectations.  Don't assume she knows what you want and what you mean.  Be humble enough to explain - or explain again - what you mean or what you want.  Obviously you need to be humble in your wants too, being willing to compromise and work together, but often we are our own worst enemies as we allow our pride or our assumptions to get in the way of clear communication.  Let her know if she hurts your feelings (don't just get silent and moody).  Let her know if she says something that makes you feel really good (she has to learn how to communicate her love and respect for you too).  Talk about sex and money and family - the three most difficult and loaded topics in a marriage - humbly and honestly.  And be sure to listen more than you talk.

24. Remember that God's gift of marriage is more about making you holy than about making you happy.  This statement is not a christianized way of expressing despair of joy in marriage - just the opposite.  It points us to the fact that our happiness comes first from God and his work for and in us and then from the gifts he gives us.  If you look to your marriage to make you ultimately happy, you will put a god-weight on it that will crush your spouse and destroy your heart.  You are two broken people covenanting together to make one whole life - there will be bumps, hardships, pain and a need for confession and forgiveness.  But God is at work in it all - not to just make your wife a better person, but to make you a better man.  Embrace God's sanctifying work in your marriage and it will help you see his hand of blessing in the challenges.

25. Dream together. Hope is the lifeblood of progress and growth. Spend time fostering hope by dreaming together. These dreams don't have to be realistic or even attainable - but they do communicate shared hopes.  It is also a great way to discover more about your wife. You may have one of those moments, "Really - you would want that?" Those moments are invaluable as you learn more about your wife and what delights her.

OK, thought of one more I want to include, so here's a BONUS:

26. Date your wife weekly and ask good questions.  Dates don't have to be expensive or formal - but they do need to be intentional and planned.  A quiet hour or two on the back porch sharing coffee can be just as intimate a date as a night on the town if it is carefully thought through.  Put away the cell phones and lap tops.  Create space for conversation.  Have fun.  And don't forget to ask good questions - like, How are you? or What is making you happy this week?  or If you could do one thing you haven't done, what would it be?  It's not rocket science - it's just about asking, listening, and valuing her heart.

So, this list is far from complete... but I hope it is at least a good start.  Blessings to you and your wife as you seek to grow in intimacy and joy together.

Also, if you have any other great tips, post them in the comments!