If you're losing the battles, you'll lose the war

There’s an old saying that has earned the respect of many, including me. It’s almost always in reference to two types of relationships: parent-child and husband-wife. It goes like this, "Lose the battle, win the war." I actually support this fun little saying that adds loads of value when deciding whether to fight or let things go, but I think there’s a fatal flaw when we live this out in marriage. So, I am going to retract my undying love for this way of thinking and instead I am going to share what Jake and I actually live out in our own marriage.

Every single little battle counts.

Every single little battle needs to be fought, together.

We just don’t need to fight against each other in the battles.

What do I mean by battles? I am talking about the things that are going to affect your marriage. That doesn't mean we spend our precious married years arguing about everything! Heaven's no. There is much to be said about loving your spouse well by not letting every little thing that bothers you work it's way into the sacred space of your heart. BUT, anything that will hang around in your heart needs to be brought to the loving, safe space of the marriage battle ground where all things sacred are worked through together. Putting away our swords (aka: fighting words) and shields (aka: pride), we face the things that matter together.

My husband and I attended a marriage conference a few years ago that probably changed the course of our marriage. One of the best things that was presented was the idea that it’s not the big things that destroy and kill a marriage, it’s all the daily little things that add up and wear down on the relationship. The speaker told a story of how he once visited a vineyard in sunny California. While touring the stunning place that stretched out for miles, he noticed there was a rather large fence that lined the property, right outside the rows of grape vines. When he asked the owner why in the world they would need such intense protection in an area with limited wildlife, the owner responded this way, “The greatest predator of the vine is small animals, like the fox. If a fox gets close enough, he will nibble ever so slightly on a vine and the damage from that one little nibble will be so detrimental that it can kill the entire length of the vine.” I remember thinking, yes, yes, yes! For the first time I felt like someone had put to words what had been happening in our relationship for YEARS. We did things like sugar coat everything instead of being honest and forth coming about what we were feeling, we regularly dropped conversations because we didn’t want to argue, or the very worst was that we just didn’t talk at all and kept quiet about things that were weighing on us because we were too scared, felt like it was too much work OR we thought it was the “good Christian thing to do” by just letting things go. But by doing that we lose the chance to be a real couple that faces real problems so we can be really intimate. We traded maximum depth to our relationship because we wanted minimum conflict. It almost destroyed us.  And on top of that, not facing the little things together meant we were ill-prepared to face the big things together.

Jake and I have learned the hard way that if we aren't intentional in our marriages about owning the small battles, then we risk the daily nibbles setting fire to our relationships and destroying what we’ve worked for. I don’t mean we need to fight against each other, I mean we need to work it out, talk it out and in that we are fighting together for our marriage. Sometimes this means addressing your disdain for his lack of aim when throwing his dirty socks across the bedroom and attempting to land them in the laundry basket. Other times it means talking about the hard stuff like his porn addiction or your habit of making fun of him in front of his friends or the pain that has been buried in you from all the times you caught him looking too close at another woman. Either way, whether it seems deep or small, those are real feelings that take root in us every day and they are the hard little nibbles that need to find space in our day to be talked about. There is a way to do this with love and grace and kindness but it will look messy and it will take time to get it right. What am I saying, we’ll never get it right. But we’ll get a rhythm and it will feel so refreshing and beautiful-hard that we wont want to go back to the old way of pushing everything to the side and hoping we get over it or our spouse changes.

In the early years of our marriage Jake and I spent way too many nights trying to make small talk and act normal when we both had copious amounts of hurt and questions and things we needed to just talk about. So many nights of feeling lonely even though we were holding hands, all because we never felt really heard. From the little annoyances of our days to the deepest wounds in our souls, it piled up. It caused us to stumble and it took a lot of work in counseling and on our own to learn the value in working together to uncover the layers of battles that laid dormant – both big and small. And even with all the hard work we’ve done, we can easily slip back into the habit of stuffing and avoiding.  But what keeps us pushing forward to stay open is that we’ve seen what it looks like to do the work and we’ve seen what it looks like to get lazy and scared, and at the end of the day we are more afraid of what happens if we don’t fight the daily battles together, then the hard work it takes if we do.

Fighting for your marriage simply means that you are you want to have a thriving marriage that doesn’t settle for stagnant and stale. Winning is about winning together. Because in marriage, a win-lose is really a lose-lose. The only way to win the battle together is to have a win-win score. That's thriving. That's winning. Why choose chicken nuggets when we can have fillet mignon, right? Why lose the little battles in silence when we can stand together and fight for our marriage and then enjoy the amazing rewards from the hard work. If there is nothing else you remember from reading this, please remember this…

 If it's going to affect your marriage, it counts and it's a battle worth fighting. If you don’t fight the little battles together, you will lose the war. Because the war to be won is less about simply staying married and much more about how good of a marriage you actually have.