Keeping Happily Ever After Happy: 4 Tips for the Newly Married

Marriage – one of the most crazy exciting, super fun, and yet extremely challenging adventures I’ve ever been on!  Six months since our wedding one thing we are learning is how much we need other young couples to share this journey with us – to swap crazy fight stories, to give each other date night tips, and just to enjoy the ride together.

So, in the spirit of sharing the lessons learned, here are 4 tips to help young marrieds keep life happy:

1. Friends, friends, and more friends

A friend is always loyal, and a brother is born to help in time of need.

Proverbs 17:17 (NLT)

We’re finding there is nothing more refreshing after a big fight than hearing from another couple that they’ve been through the exact same thing, and learning how they worked through it. We’re very grateful to be part of the professionals ministry at the BACC where we have a group of friends who believe in being real and loyal and putting this scripture into practice.

Decide to make other young married couples your best friends and open up about what you really need help with in your marriage. A good way to start is by inviting other couples over for dinner and games. After about half a dozen or so swapped stories, you’ll start to realize you’re more normal than you think.

2. Share a common purpose

Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose.

Philippians 2:2

My husband and I both work as mentors for teenagers in our Y-ministry, and we find this scripture super helpful. It teaches that when we share a common purpose, loving and agreeing with each other will naturally follow. Sharing a common purpose for helping other people gives us more vision for our relationship and why God put us together with our different strengths and weaknesses.

The Bible talks about how our purpose is to love other people (1 Timothy 1:5). As a couple if you decide to help other people together, your own problems will seem a lot smaller.

3. Don’t take yourself too seriously

Pride leads to disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.

Proverbs 11:2 (NLT)

In the midst of a stressful few months, one of the best pieces of advice we got from some more “seasoned” married friends was … don’t take yourselves so seriously!

We do best when we know that we are new at this marriage thing, and that’s okay. Miscommunications, misunderstandings and hurt feelings are bound to happen, but what matters is how we handle them. Pride is when we think we “should know” what to do, and we don’t ask for help or admit what we need, so we just end up feeling disgraced and embarrassed about how our marriage is going.

Humility leads to wisdom, so the more we accept, embrace and learn from our mistakes the better we’ll be. Take time to journal about what you have learned so far in marriage about communication, consideration, or even about yourself.

4. Make a new Goal: Be Known

8 In the past you did not know God. You were slaves to gods that were not real. 9 But now you know the true God. Really, though, it is God who knows you.

Galatians 4:8-9 (ERV)

What are your goals in your marriage? I think we all have them, whether we realize it or not. To be happy, to be satisfied, to love and be loved, to enjoy life, or to be close, to name a few. One new goal we have is to be known, and to know each other. When our goal is just to be known, to have our spouse know our feelings, fears, sins, and thoughts, we can be happy under any circumstances. Even the biggest fights help us get to know each other better.

Being known starts with God. When we work at letting God know everything about us, we can let our spouse know us much more easily. A place to start is praying through fears and insecurities you may have in your marriage. Make it your goal to be known by God, and everything else will follow suit.