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What I'd Tell My 20-Year-Old Self Now That I'm 30 Years Married

A moment of reflection — Photo by Honey Yanibel Minaya Cruz (@Earthbellph)

Thirty years. I keep saying it out loud because it still sounds like someone else's number. And yet here we are — same man, same vows, a lot more gray hair between the two of us, and a daughter who is roughly the age I was when I walked down that aisle thinking I had most of it figured out.

I didn't.

July has a way of making me reflective. Maybe it's the long evenings, the way everything slows down just enough to let your thoughts catch up with you. I've been sitting with a lot of them lately. And I keep thinking about what I wish someone had quietly pulled me aside and said — not a lecture, just a honest word from someone who'd been further down the road.

So here's what I'd tell her. That girl in the lace dress who was equal parts thrilled and terrified.

You're going to feel lonely sometimes, and that doesn't mean something is wrong.

I think this one caught me the most off guard. I assumed that once you found your person, loneliness was off the table. But marriage doesn't erase the need to also know yourself — and sometimes, knowing yourself means sitting with feelings your spouse can't fix. I noticed, somewhere in our second decade, that the loneliness I felt in certain seasons wasn't about him at all. It was mine to bring to God, to a journal, to a good friend. Learning that distinction quietly saved us both a lot of misplaced frustration.

Conflict isn't a warning sign. Avoidance is.

I spent too many early years either swallowing things whole or saying them sideways — that very introverted habit of letting something fester because the conversation felt too hard to start. I thought a quiet house meant a peaceful marriage. I think now that it just meant a quieter kind of distance. The couples I've watched last aren't the ones who never fight. They're the ones who learned how to fight fair and then actually come back to the table.

His way of loving you might not look like your love language. That's okay.

I wanted words. He showed up with actions — fixed things, remembered small details, drove me places without complaining. For years I mentally graded his love against a rubric he never agreed to. I'm a little embarrassed by that now. I think what helped most was deciding to actually notice what he was doing instead of cataloguing what he wasn't saying.

Your faith will carry your marriage in the seasons when you can't carry each other.

There were hard years. I'm not going to dress that up. Years where we were both depleted and neither of us had much to give. What held us together in those stretches wasn't romantic heroics — it was something quieter. It was waking up and choosing again, even when it felt more like obedience than desire. I'm genuinely grateful we had something bigger than our feelings to anchor to, because our feelings were not always reliable narrators.

You won't always like each other. Liking is a season. Love is a practice.

I noticed somewhere around year twelve that I'd confused love with a feeling I was supposed to always have rather than a thing I was supposed to keep doing. The days I liked him least were usually the days I was most depleted, most distracted, most in my own head. Showing up anyway — making his coffee, asking about his day, laughing at the same dumb thing we always laugh at — that's what kept the feeling of love from going too far underground.

The small ordinary days are the whole thing. Not the highlight reel.

I spent some early years waiting for life to get to the good part. The vacation, the milestone, the moment that would feel significant. I think I'd tell my younger self to look around more on a Tuesday. The ordinary days — the groceries, the side-by-side evenings, the inside jokes, the boring routines — that's not the backdrop to the marriage. That IS the marriage.

My daughter is watching us now the way I used to watch my own parents — taking notes she doesn't even know she's taking. I hope what she sees is two imperfect people who stayed, who laughed, who chose each other on the ordinary days as much as the milestone ones.

That's really the whole story. Thirty years of ordinary days that turned out to be extraordinary after all.

If you've been married a while — or if you're just starting out — I'd love to hear one thing you know now that you didn't on day one. Leave it in the comments. I read every one.

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