A Second Honeymoon
celebrating 18 years of marriage
Sunflowers are special to me. My mom seeded her garden with them the year Philip and I were married in my parents’ backyard. She and a team of friends made bouquets to line the aisle leading to a grapevine archway where Ed Morsey and Mike Sanborn officiated. Granada’s choir sang “Be Thou My Vision.” Brian Trevor led the music. Justin Francis played the piano and helped run sound with Hiro Goto. Kathy Little coordinated. Many others helped. It was beautiful.
Phil and I are experiencing a second honeymoon this year. We’ve been married 18 years on August 18th, and it has been so rich. But this year, we’ve fallen in love with one another all over again. I love being married to Philip. He’s easy-going, positive, encouraging, flexible, patient, attentive, humble, respectable, servant-hearted, loyal, faithful, interested in people, hilarious, and does great impressions.
One of the most impressive things that I discovered after we were married was that Phil would stand still, looking me in the eye while I tried to get my thoughts into cohesive sentences. I was floored that he would want to listen to me so attentively.
We come from a unique heritage. We are both fifth-generation Quaker/Friends, actually, it probably goes back further than that, but that’s what we’ve found recorded. Phil’s great, great grandparents were Quaker missionaries in Mexico before starting Pico Rivera Friends Church. My great, great grandma was a recorded Quaker minister whose poetry we still have among our family records. Her husband was a pastor as well. All our grandparents, when they were living, attended Granada Heights Friends Church. Both our parents met and married at Granada two weeks apart from each other. My parents on March 4th, and Phil’s parents on March 18th. About five years later, Phil and I were born five months apart and grew up in the same nursery, elementary, high school, and college departments.
Our parents attended the same parenting classes and put us in similar schools. We both listened to the Bible re-enacted on cassette tapes, and both were easily the most knowledgeable kids about Bible facts. In Granada’s elementary program, we memorized the same Bible verses, attended the same all-church campouts, and ran around campus during Granada’s week-long summer event called S.T.A.R.T. Our moms were both creative, resourceful types, and our dads were handy fix-it sort of guys with desk jobs who served as elders at Granada.
Despite all this, due to our different grades and friend groups, we didn’t hang out together until college, where we finally noticed each other and got married in 2007. Phil says I played hard-to-get for a while, but I was just making sure he was serious. He was serious; I’m so thankful.
This past year has been a challenging one. I think we’ve learned more than in any other year, and perhaps that’s what’s prompting this feeling of being newlyweds again. One of the things we learned is about how Phil and I deal with conflict. At marriage seminars, you hear about the arguing, verbally destructive, simpering, divisive couples, but not our situation. I don’t hear of couples dealing with conflict like this, so I’m putting this on paper for anyone else who might find themselves in a similar situation.
We don’t really fight or argue.
We don’t bottle it all up inside and grow resentful either.
We both generally prefer to adapt to each other. And that has worked for a peaceful marriage for many years.
However, this past year forced us to come to grips with all that wasn’t being hashed out. Turns out we both have a difficult time representing our deep heart issues to one another. Me, because the process of interpreting my observations into reasonable thoughts to spoken words that I feel safe to say takes forever, and Phil, because he’s often unaware of what’s going on inside himself.
Amid the tangles this has caused, God has been showing us how He uniquely crafted us to come alongside one another like Christ does.
Phil’s patient, easy-going spirit provides me the space and time to figure out what's going on and to order my thoughts to speak up. And Phil’s clear-headed gut feelings have helped me get out of my head to do the things that need to get done.
My delight in observation and truth-finding has equipped me to present possible hypotheses to a receptive Philip about what might be going on in situations I observe. And my comprehensive analysis and fearless breakdown of sticky subjects help Phil delve into uncomfortable topics of conversation.
We’re only beginning to see the beauty of how God designed and orchestrated our marriage to complement and support one another. We’ve also been seeing how this unique union must be guarded. If we do not protect our time together, our “with-ness,” so to speak, we not only grow apart but lose the help and companionship of each other. We are learning the importance of safeguarding our ability to be together and our openness with each other.
We’ve found we best operate when walking together, both literally and figuratively. This is how we communicated while dating; we did things together. We made college group movies. We ran a marathon. We hiked in the hills. We played board games. We went on mission trips. We walked for hours in the neighborhoods around my parents’ house, talking and maybe making out some too. Dates and dinners were nice too, but we enjoyed walking side by side most of all.
In the coming years, we desire to preserve and protect our “with-ness” by instilling some new rhythms. We’re still working on what that might look like—having very active and verbal children is making this a challenge, but they’re almost at the age where we can leave them alone for an hour or two. Oh joy!
This spring, several volunteer sunflowers sprouted in our garden beds. Over the months, one of these sunflowers grew higher than the others. It grew up past our climbing cucumbers, higher than our sweet pea vines, and eventually surpassed our neighbor’s roofline. In June, its many long stalks of picture-perfect flowers bloomed, supplying seeds and nectar to many birds and insects. It feels like a testimony to the good thing God is doing in our marriage: same flowers, a new year. We didn’t plant that sunflower, but we sure did compost the garden beds. Didn’t you know? Compost is the best thing for growth?
Thanks for reading. To read more about what I’ve learned about marriage over the past few years, click a link below.
What a beautiful writer you are, Abby! And a beautiful testimony of God's work in your marriage. Thank you for sharing!
Love this Abby... Wonderful in meaning and very well written. We look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks! 💕