So You Want The Truth About My Marriage?

{our engagement session}

Oh friends. I get emails every week asking about my marriage. It is one of the most asked topics from my 'I Wanna Know...' series each week.
The questions usually sound like this:
"How do you maintain such a wonderful, amazing marriage?"
"Ryan seems like the perfect husband...how did you snag such a prince charming?"
"How can I come up with creative ideas to keep the love alive like you two do?"
Now, while I am extremely flattered by these questions, I want to take some time to be honest and real with you.
Is Ryan my prince charming? Yes, I see him as my best friend. He is such an amazing blessing in my life and I feel honored that God chose to let me be his wife. He is sweet, thoughtful, patient, kind, hilarious and encouraging. He loves me for me and makes me happier than any other human being ever has.
People warn you when you get married that "the first year is soooooo hard" or "you'll have some of the roughest days when you first get married - but don't worry, it gets easier". I have not found this to be the case. Ryan and I didn't live together before we were married, so we had just as much adjusting to do the first year as any other couple in that situation. He had weird quirks and so did I, but somehow we co-habitate extremely well together. We think the same about a lot of things, so I think that helped a bunch. I feel incredibly blessed that our first year hasn't really been a struggle, but more of a fun and enjoyable time together. I'm not naive...I know we will have rough patches in our marriage. I'm just here to say that the first year isn't always this huge, hard adjustment.
And while our first year has looked more like wedded bliss rather than a rollercoaster of ups and downs, Ryan and I's marriage is far from unicorns and butterflies.
I think it is unfair when bloggers portray a life on their blog that doesn't really exist. I never want you guys to think that either A) I have a perfect marriage or B) I have a "blah" marriage and I just blog about it in a way to make it seem more glamorous than it is.
Hence this post.
I love being married, but Ryan and I have had our fair share of problems as well. We don't usually have "blow outs", but rather small disagreements that pass in 5 minutes. We don't like staying upset for long. But we did have one major problem a month or two after we got married.
Facebook.
I've talked about this in another post, but Ryan and I were getting into constant fights about Facebook. It came to light that exes of ours were "spying" on our life through friends. Basically, the exes were friends with some of our Facebook friends, which allowed them to still view pictures and things on our profiles. Ryan and I made the decision to cancel our individual accounts and create a joint account. Did we get made fun of? Yep. But we didn't care. We took this step to prevent future marital problems or arguments. No one else is in my marriage except Ryan and I (and God of course), so I just didn't care what anyone else had to say about it...until it came to one of my best friends.
When we made the joint account, we only friended family, close family friends, or mutual friends of Ryan & I. The one thing we told our friends is that we couldn't friend them if they were still friends with any of our exes (due to the issues we were having before). This wasn't an issue with anyone except for one of my bridesmaids. Even though she is one of my oldest girlfriends, she wanted to stay FB friends with one of my ex-boyfriends. I wasn't mad, I said that it was her choice, but I explained that I wasn't going to be able to be friends through FB anymore.
That cost me my friendship with her. We are still friends on Instagram, but after that, she never really treated me the same. The choice was hers, and quite frankly, I was hurt that even though she was MY best friend, she chose to be friends with that guy instead. We haven't talked in months. It's been one of the hardest things for me to accept, but my marriage comes first. I was not going to continue to let something as stupid as Facebook cause issues and fights in my marriage.
Does this all sound ridiculous? Maybe. But probably because this centers around social media. ANYTHING can cause problems with your spouse. It doesn't matter how trivial an item is to every other single person in the world...if it's taking a negative toll on your marriage, you need to cut it out of your life or get ahold of it.
Do Ryan and I have the same Facebook account because we don't trust each other? No.
But do you know how many divorces are rooted in Facebook each year? 1/3. 
That is not a joke. Go look it up on Google. Ryan and I just decided, "Why even give evil a foothold?". We got rid of it to prevent that temptation from ever coming into our lives.
I just wanted to write this to let you all know that while I have a loving, beautiful marriage, I still have issues to deal with as well. Don't ever get discouraged from reading about other blogger's marriages that seem "perfect". If you are going through a rough patch, just know, we all go through them too. Ladies should be open and honest with their readers about all sorts of things in their life. None of us have it all together: we aren't the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect student...
We're all just human. We're imperfect, but we should embrace that. We can use those imperfections to relate to each other, learn from one another and bond together as friends.

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