It has been 5 years and two months, my husband says 62 months, and he keeps up with our anniversaries monthly, since we got married. We did a scary thing. Probably was not the wisest thing to do, or done in the right timing, but we did it and we have survived and have no regrets. The reason I can say that is because we have discussed if we have regrets and we both say we are happy with our situation. Thank God! We rushed into marriage by conventional wisdom standards. We dated only 8 months, and I had only technically been divorced for 4 months when we went on our first date. His wife had passed only two months before that. In our defense, I had been separated 16 months before my divorce. Roy’s wife had been struggling and suffering for three and a half years in her battle with Leukemia. She had been at death’s door before, more than once, and he had grieved along the way, little by little, struggle by struggle, close call by close call, crisis by crisis.
We were in our 50’s and I have a theory about that. I believe that because of that we didn’t want to waste any more time. We both had lived difficult lives, had endured much suffering and more grace related to our bad choices from our younger years. We just couldn’t not take the chance at finding happiness and comfort with a partner.
We did the preparatory work. We answered difficult questions, shared painful true stories from our past, and shocked each other with our sense of security and trust in the other person quickly. Yes, he could have taken advantage of me. He could have completely changed when we got married.
The reality is that we both have parts of us that are disappointing to ourselves and those parts have developed out of our past hurts or our personality type extremes. We can’t find people to date that don’t have issues based on those factors.
How did we know that it was safe to get married? We didn’t. Ultimately we trusted in the basics of our faith. God was in it. God knew what we needed. We were both aware that we were dependent on Him for our very survival by this point in our lives and beyond that, we trusted Him to have guided us to this very point. Didn’t mean we couldn’t mess up and stretch his grace but ultimately we trusted that we were covered by it, no matter what we would do, He would be with us, attempting to get our attention and putting guideposts in our paths.
We decided to make a Covenant to stay married, no matter what, till death do us part.
Grace Full 