“So what’s the secret sauce? 10 years in, you guys must have some insider tips!” 

A friend of ours asked us for marriage tips one evening. I didn’t have a ready answer; honestly, I could barely believe that my husband and I are old enough to say that we’ve been married for 10 years. 

“The Holy Spirit,” I responded. “We don’t have any secret insider tips, other than to rely on the Holy Spirit to walk us through it all.”

While that may sound nothing more than just a good Sunday School answer, I meant it with all sincerity, giving credit to whom credit is due. The high emotions of courtship and the early months of marriage may have been charming and all, but at least in my experience, I soon came to the realization that marriage isn’t for the faint of heart. 

In high school, one of my favourite movies was the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ novel The Notebook. As an impressionable seventeen-year-old, Noah and Allie’s love story became the pinnacle of romance: dancing on moonlit streets, handwritten love letters, locking eyes in a rowboat amidst a swan-filled lake. Thankfully, by the time I met my husband seven years later, much of the cinematic fantasy faded away… or so I thought. I was overjoyed to find real love, eager to write our own love story. As it turned out, while I thought I have matured enough to snap out of the unrealistic romance portrayed in novels and in Hollywood, I was surprised to find how much imaginary love stories continued to permeate into my expectations for real-life marriage. 

Looking back at journal entries from the early years after the wedding, I wrote: 

“I don’t really know what I was expecting of marriage, but I know that I wasn’t quite expecting this.”

By ‘this’, I was referring to our dark and painful years of waiting for children. In years two and three of marriage, we were in the throes of unexplained infertility. Throughout that season, I felt distant from God and from my husband. I expected the journey towards beginning our family to be romantic and blissful, full of joy and excitement much like the many pregnancy announcements that peppered my social media feeds. And yet, our experience was nothing but. Test after heartbreaking test showed one line and not two, a cyclical reminder of how our family life is not starting out like what I had always imagined it to be. 

I yearned so much to become a mother. And when my dreams weren’t being realized, I started to turn inward, to withdraw from community and relationships. 

Instead of leaning into the pain with me, my husband didn’t quite know how to enter into the heartbreak. He didn’t know how to deal with his wife’s sadness and remedy the situation. He wanted to fix things, make things better. All I wanted to do was wallow and cry. We were only in our second year of marriage and already the notion of dancing on moonlit streets and writing love notes felt unrealistic and far-fetched. So much for my happily-ever-after.

Two years passed and we still haven’t been able to get pregnant. The emotional rollercoaster that we went through was taking a toll on our relationship, so we decided to loosen our grip on the desire to conceive and instead open our hearts to the possibility of adoption, if that is where God is leading us. No sooner than us completing the required adoption course, did those two faint pink lines finally appear. 

In our bout with infertility, I realized that I created a mental image of a family and set my heart on it, following a timeline that I desired. My expectations of marriage looked outwardly in the wrong places. While we often said that we were praying for a miracle, in reality, there was little room for the Holy Spirit to work. When things weren’t going “according to plan” – at least according to my plan – the temptation was to question why things aren’t as they should be. 

When my husband wasn’t leaning into my pain like I thought he ought to, I started to wonder if he truly had what it takes to be my husband. I started to question what God planned for our marriage and for our family, especially because our prayers for having children weren’t being realized.

When I let go of the expectations that I unintentionally put onto my marriage and our family, I became more aware of how the Holy Spirit had been present in our marriage and in our family all along. Only when we relinquished control over our fertility and offered it back to God did we experience the miracle of walking with God and being more fully attuned to His plans for us.

Because we remained childless for the first few years into our marriage, we were able to focus on our relationship and the complexities that arose when you merge two lives into one. 

While my husband and I have many shared hobbies and interests, we also had a lot of differences that required intentional focus and effort. I was born and raised Catholic in a lower-middle class family in the Philippines, while my husband grew up as an Evangelical missionary kid in a small town in Alberta, Canada. I am an introverted only child while my husband is an extroverted eldest of three. 

The differences in our faith practices as a devoted Catholic and Evangelical Christian required both of us to engage in our faith in unconventional ways. 

When we first started dating, we both secretly assumed that one of us would convert for the other. 

Ten years into our marriage, neither of us have converted, but I can honestly say that our individual and family faith journeys have been made stronger by the intentionality and investment we’ve put into making our ecumenical marriage work. 

I’ll admit that in the first few years of marriage, there were seasons and circumstances that made me wonder if life would have been easier if I just married a Catholic, someone who shared my faith practices and beliefs. But through prayer and spiritual guidance, the Holy Spirit continues to convict me that my vocation into marriage isn’t about setting expectations for what is easy; rather I need to turn my eyes towards what is holy. 

So whenever the temptation arose to fantasize over an imaginary spouse who may be a “better fit”, I was able to turn my eyes back towards the Holy Spirit and ask Him to continue to work in my heart and in my marriage.

The Holy Spirit is truly present in all the details; if only I had eyes to see. Too often I was lost in my own plans and expectations to witness how God is faithfully sanctifying my husband and I individually and as a family. 

God wasn’t just present in the big things like infertility and ecumenism, but also in the little things. Frustrated by the amount of times I have had to pick up dirty socks all over our home, I set out to start a tally of the many times I’ve had to pick up my husband’s socks. 

I was going to write it on a sheet of paper and post it up on our bedroom wall. I wanted to make a visual representation of how careless he had been, so that I could hold it over him. 

Suddenly, I was reminded of the Scripture passages we’ve chosen to read at our wedding: 

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”  (1 Cor 13:4-7, emphasis mine)

Ouch. I wanted to be vindicated, to be justified in my frustrations about having to serve my husband in such a way. While I wanted to childishly prove a point, the Holy Spirit was patient enough with me to gently remind me of values that I held and virtues I wanted to practice. 

It is truly wild to contend with your own selfishness when you are dealing with another soul that is so deeply intertwined with yours.

In my ten years of marriage, I didn’t expect to confront so many ugly versions of myself so frequently, over the most trivial things. No amount of rom-coms and romance novels could have prepared me for wrestling with my will, or choosing to prioritize my spouse’s needs over mine. 

Our culture speaks rather loudly about “living your best life”, or the freedom to “you do you”, often at the expense of valued relationships. We’re bombarded with messages about self-care and self-fulfillment, whispering ideas that if something –or someone– is in the way of being your best self, then you’re free to move on along to search for greener pastures. 

I mean it with all sincerity that the only real “secret sauce” to a good marriage is utter reliance on the Holy Spirit. Because left to our own devices, we will turn towards fantasies and ideals, counterfeit love instead of sanctifying relationships. If it were solely up to me, I don’t know if our marriage would have made it. Thankfully, it’s not all under my control. By grace, God has protected my marriage and my family and kept us under His care. 

In ways only possible with the help of the Holy Spirit, my marriage has been grounded in the true purpose of the marriage vocation: to spur one another unto holiness, ushering each other into God’s arms. We need to be tethered to a spiritual reality; otherwise we will be caught up in imaginary romance better suited for silver screens or stylized squares.

While all this sounds well and good, I know from experience that it feels impractical to only be told that the Holy Spirit did all of the work. I should clarify that there needed to be actual heart change on our part that allowed the Holy Spirit to work more clearly through us. That’s not to say that He can’t work without our efforts, because surely He is more capable than that, but I can say that I experienced His power more radically when I changed my posture towards Him.

Here are three practical ways to combat false expectations in marriage in order to be oriented toward the spiritual reality of your vocation:

  1. Be in the Word. How better can we hear from God and hear His message to us than to be immersed in His own words in Scripture? Lately, I’ve been pondering spiritual nuggets in Ephesians 4:26-27, 31-32: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil (...) Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” (emphasis mine). I think back on the time that I wanted to keep score and vindictively prove my point. Doing so makes room for the devil to drive a wedge between my husband and I, but thankfully, the Holy Spirit intervened with wisdom from the Scriptures.

  2. Be on the same team. Because of the ecumenical nature of our marriage, I often thought of our Catholic vs. Protestant differences as “us vs. them”. Many of our faith arguments started with, “You guys do this, but we do this…” Sitting on opposite sides of the table never really amounted to any kind of peaceful resolution. A breakthrough for us was when we decided that when it came to our marriage, there is no “us vs. them”. There’s no “other” team; we are the team. More importantly, we need to always be reminded of the fact that we are a team of three: husband, wife, and God.

  3. Surround yourself with cheerleaders – for your marriage. Our culture does a superb job of rooting for the individual, but sometimes in doing so, it does more harm than good. There’s no short supply in visual ideas for a bridal wedding party, but you’d be hard-pressed to find tips for continuing to root for a couple long after the wedding. A friend of mine once told me that when another friend of hers started to entertain the idea of breaking her marriage vow, she lovingly spoke with her and reminded her that as a bridesmaid to their wedding years ago, she wasn’t just there to stand up with the bride for the pretty pictures. Your marriage needs people like that in your corner. My husband and I each belong to a men’s and women’s group that meet regularly. People who are privy to the ins and outs of our relationship. People who are unafraid to say “you’re out of line” or “you need to heal”. Let the wisdom of the Holy Spirit come through others. 

I’ll leave it to Pope St. John Paul II to sum it all up: 

“Christian marriage, like the other sacraments, ‘whose purpose is to sanctify people, to build up the body of Christ, and finally, to give worship to God,’ is in itself a liturgical action glorifying God in Jesus Christ and in the Church.” (Familiaris Consortio, Section 56)