Last week, I posted about how I met my husband. I’m not a superstitious person, but it still sort of felt risky, in a way. When you talk about how good things are, that’s when it typically falls apart, right?

Just days later, shit hit the fan.

I do my cussing sparingly, but there is just no other way to put it.

It kind of amazes me that we could have been living together as teammates and life partners for more than 11 years and hadn’t been able to peel back the layers. Honestly, we hadn’t been forced to. It was easy to assume we could get away with not doing it.

But then we had to.

We have peeled and peeled, and we still aren’t done.

But I feel like I get him in a way I never did before, and he gets me.

He said something last night when we were talking, and I had an immediate internal reaction that said, “Yes! That’s exactly how I feel, too!” and I don’t know if that has ever happened before.

It wasn’t that we’d never told each other how we feel. We did that all the time. But if Intimacy is a mountain, we just scaled much higher than we have ever gone before.

It was really hard. It continues to be hard, thinking about what we might have yet to deal with going forward. But shining a light on the parts of ourselves we would rather not have shared with one another was only a positive thing.

What is my point? I realized today that up until last week, I tended to think of marital intimacy as being roughly equivalent to sex. I have a much different understanding of it now. I’ve probably just touched the tip of the iceberg, but it has little to do with sex.

If you are married, and you are keeping a part of yourself to yourself – maybe because you’re afraid the other person will hate that part the way you do, or because you feel like you need to reserve a little piece of your autonomy to keep being YOU: That is a lie.

Maybe the course correction will take a lifetime; maybe you’ll have a weekend intensive and power through as much crud as possible so that you can begin your relationship with a fresh start.

I know for most people that process of opening up will happen when it has to, because who would choose that? It’s a painful process. And because it involves two human beings, there are a lot of moving parts. Even if it is ultimately successful, you can be almost sure there will be a three steps forward, two steps back approach.

It is so hard, especially in the Christian community, to talk about marriage. We talk about it being work, but we never get specific.

It never was work for us until this week, and when that happened, it felt sudden and isolating.

When people are open about their struggles, it often feels like oversharing or gossiping. But how can we share insight with one another if we can’t talk about this without judgment?

I felt God in my own life this week, and saw him in my husband’s, guiding us through this when we were unable to talk openly with others, and while we were learning to talk openly with each other.

I’m still mapping out the lay of the land on this side, but so far, I like what I see.

Photo credit YouVersion Bible App. One of my favorite features on the app is taking a favorite verse or one of their verses of the day and turning it into a pretty meme – or in this case, borrowing one of theirs.