Hello guys! I’m definitely the most excited person in South Africa about this post, in my mind you’d swear it was my Masters thesis hand in lol, and that’s only because I find marriage posts a labour of love. I’m sure most of you have gathered from reading a few of my blog posts that marriage and relationships is one of things I’m most passionate about it. I definitely know that I’m called to do a lot of things in this area, but that’s a post for another day. The state of marriages, the rise in divorce, the portrayal of marriage, just a few topics that set my heart on fire. I honestly can’t imagine what my life was like before I started co running the Young Wives Club, it’s been three years of living an answered prayer and purpose. I thought my first marriage post of the year should start with areas of my marriage that my husband and I identified needed an urgent makeover. Marriage is not perfect and here’s a glimpse into our imperfect marriage.
Budget
Can you believe that we’ve never written up a budget, actually let me re-phrase that, we’ve never properly stuck to one at any point in our marriage. We attempted a budget sometime during our first year of marriage and to be honest we failed dismally. My husband found me extremely overbearing, cause I would keep every receipt and I had a notebook for all our expenditures, apart from the Excel spreadsheet we had created. Looking back I can see why he felt that way and I can’t help but feel embarrassed at how extreme I was, BUT in all fairness, I felt he was definitely too relaxed in his approach and I know he would agree with me on this. We found it quite difficult to relate to one another in this area because of the polar opposite approaches, so instead of reaching a solution we decided to avoid the issue all together…… Sound familiar anyone?! This year we’ve decided that a budget is a non negotiable, because we realized how unwise it was of us to think we could ever get far in life without a plan, which is essentially what a budget is. I owe this “new-found” revelation of a budget to one of the members of the Young Wives Club that made us watch a financial video by Dave Ramsey called Proven biblical money principles (Click on it if you’d like to watch). In this video he discusses five profound principles and of course the very first one had to be living on a written budget. The foundational scripture was taken from Luke 14: 28 “But don’t begin until you count the cost. For who would begin construction of a building without first calculating the cost to see if there is enough money to finish it?”
The scripture above was exactly what we needed to hear and thankfully it resulted in a proactive and immediate response. Literally that very evening after discussing what we had listened to we created our budget for the month, and yes it was on Excel lol!. To be honest it was such a huge relief for me, because my personality thrives on having a plan in place for just about everything. I love the feeling of having direction, a to-do list ( hello Type A personality), a plan and working together as a team. In hindsight I realize that it’s honestly by the grace of God that we made financially wise decisions throughout the years. The truth is, it’s important to have financial goals as a married couple, both short and long-term goals, but more than anything to make financially wise decisions and ultimately to be good stewards of the money God entrusts us with. So finally we can say cheers to a life of less winging it and more adulting!
Quality Time
Our lives for the past year or so have been so crazy. I honestly can’t begin to express how difficult it is to live without a helper or at least an optional reliever e.g aunties and grandparents. Balance is key and that’s not something that one can learn over night unfortunately. With the daily requirements of life such as work, cooking and Kwando’s routine, sometimes in the evenings and on some weekends you’d find us slouching on the couch ( hello parenting exhaustion) zoning out in front of the TV or scrolling through our phones, deeming that as quality time. Being parents, more often than not whenever we would step out the house we’d opt for a kid friendly restaurant or environment ( gaming arcade) which obviously meant that more than half the time was spent focused on our son. This year we’ve even put it on our vision board to re-priotize”us” again, to not be afraid to ask for help, because to be honest there are a lot of people in our lives whom we could possibly ask to watch Kwando for a couple of hours for a date.
Accountability
We unfortunately had to learn this lesson the hard way, because if I’m honest my husband and I would be way further with our goals had we practised this principle a couple of years ago. Thankfully, it’s never too late to learn! This year we’ve decided to be practical about our accountability and not just have a verbal discussion, because more often than not we would yap on about things, but hardly reach the point of execution. First thing was the completion of our vision board, we would casually write and passively talk about it each year, but it would never see the light of day in our home. We made sure this year that our vision board would be done right at the beginning of the year as a visual collage that would be hung up in the heart of our home ( kitchen) to serve as a daily reminder of what we promised to work at everyday. It honestly makes me so proud whenever I walk past it! We also decided to take it a notch higher this year and we now have a notebook ( yay me) that’s solely dedicated to our vision, we’ve chosen to review it bi-monthly since some of the things require more time than others. The last area of accountability is with our businesses, so we’ve now set aside a day every week where we check in with each other. Every Thursday we set aside 10 minutes to simply assess what we completed that week and whether it corresponds to with what we had committed to doing. So far it’s been pretty amazing and I’m so proud of the progress we’ve both made.
God
One of the things people don’t speak openly about is how difficult it is to merge devotion time from singleness to marriage. Finding our rhythm as a couple wasn’t as easy I expected it to be, I really thought it would be a seamless transition because we were used to praying and reading the Word together. However, once we got marred it seemed like it was easier to continue with our individual relationships then come together as a couple. I sometimes found myself feeling so frustrated by the lack of spiritual intimacy and I longed for more worship evenings together and Bible devotion sessions. The reality is that all of the above were unspoken expectations and assumptions. It’s a fair expectation to assume that as christian we would have a lot of shared Bible reading and prayer time, but I definitely didn’t consider the process and the amount of effort it would take for it to be seamless. We’ve now set one day out of the week to commit to coming together to read the Word. This year was also our first year fasting as a married couple. We did a 21 day Daniel Fast at the beginning of the year which really created more spiritually intimacy in our marriage.
Intentional
This word carries so much weight in relationships, more especially once you’ve had a child. A lot of things that were effortless before our son, now require more thought and intention behind them. Parenting is a very demanding role, but we’ve realised it shouldn’t be an excuse that we hide behind or even become used to using. This year we have committed to being more intentional about our primary love languages ( if you’d like to know a little more about this click here ). My husbands primary love language is physical touch and mine is words of affirmation, once again polar opposites so it presents an opportunity to practice the art of selflessness and putting your spouses needs before you’re own. This is an everyday learning area for us, because sometimes we would find ourselves being selfish giving each other what we wish we were receiving.
I really hope this will inspire you to have a chat with your spouse or partner, maybe you could pick out just two areas that you find are slightly problematic. This is definitely not an easy thing to do, especially since half the things we do stem from learnt behaviour, so this requires more unlearning then it does learning.
I really want to be as authentic and as honest as possible in my posts, so I really hope that comes across. If you ever pick up a “damn they’ve got it all figured out tone” please feel free to call me out and remind me that I’m crazy!
Special thanks to my husband for being such a trooper and agreeing to do this shoot with me, even though he dislikes being in front of the camera. I really do appreciate it baby!
P.S. Thank you Appletiser for allowing us to crown our moment!
xx
Mrs S
Photography by Mikayla Birkholtz https://www.mixtakespics.com/
Husband: H&M top | Zara jeans | Levis sneakers
Wife: |Cotton sleeveless jacket | The Fix sports bra | River Island denim | The Fix boots | Sister Bozza Earrings
| Vanity Loves sunglasses
Thank you for sharing. I’m very much into love and relationships and getting an insight into the things that couples deal with and how they choose to overcome them. I had to laugh when I read about the budget because it was a HUGE issue in our relationship as well! I was the enforcer but I wasn’t going too hard on the enforcing. My partner had never budgeted in his whole life and found budgeting to be difficult and somewhat threatening (surprisingly). It took a good few months for him to recognize the wonderful tool it is and then he became obsessed with it lol.
I like the way you write – keep sharing. Beautiful blog.
Zama:) This just warmed my heart. You read my blog! lol! Thank you and I’m so glad you guys got onto it.
I’d love for us to chat about relationships!
I always love reading your blogs!! This was my favorite!
I always love reading your blog posts!! This was my favorite!
Thank you Bev! I appreciate that:)