A Heart That Beats for Home

36. 25 Lessons Learned in 25 Years of Marriage: Love, Intentionality, and Intimacy / Lessons 1-5

• Nikki Smith • Season 1

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What if the key to a thriving marriage isn't just love, but intentionality? Join me, Nikki Smith, as I celebrate 25 years of marriage by sharing the invaluable lessons we've learned along the way. From meeting in junior high to raising children and preparing for an empty nest, our journey is filled with both trials and triumphs that have shaped our relationship. In this special episode of A Heart that Beats for Home, "25 Lessons Learned in 25 Years," I open up about the importance of setting intentional goals for your marriage, the delicate balance of truth and love in communication, and how to maintain intimacy by truly understanding and connecting with your partner.

You'll hear heartfelt personal stories and gain practical wisdom designed to encourage and guide couples in the early or hectic stages of their marriage. Discover why deliberate effort is crucial to achieving the relationship you desire and how filling gaps with grace, love, and truth can provide a stable foundation for your family. This episode is not just a reflection on our past but a roadmap for shaping the future of your own marriage, ensuring it remains strong and fulfilling for years to come.

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Speaker 1:

Hey friends, I'm Nikki Smith, your host here at A Heart that Beats for Home, the podcast where we're ditching filters and diving headfirst into the raw beauty of all things home. Now, I am no expert when it comes to this whole parenting and marriage dance. I'm simply a gal who's been riding the mom roller coaster for 22 years and a wife still untangling the mystery of it all 25 years after saying I do. My goal is to bring you unapologetically messy and boldly genuine conversations about cultivating strong families. We're gonna laugh, possibly cry, and straight talk about the joy and chaos that comes within the four walls that we call home. No judgment and certainly no perfection, just real talk from my heart, a heart that beats for home. Let's dive in.

Speaker 2:

Hello friends, welcome back to another week here at the podcast. Thanks for joining us for yet another month of content. It's so great to have you here and, as we ebb and flow through different topics coming out of our summer, with so many great interviews now coming into a couple of weeks of talking about marriage, I know I mentioned last week on the podcast that we were going to start a series on marriage, and the reason that we are doing this is to kind of celebrate a personal milestone in my own life and my marriage. This month we are celebrating 25 years of marriage. I do not know how that is possible. I don't feel old enough to have been married for 25 years, but reality is we are getting older and indeed we are celebrating 25 years on September 18th, and so I thought it would be super fun this month just to take a handful of weeks and work through 25 lessons that I have learned in the last 25 years and I'm definitely not going to call it 25 tips, because this is not about giving any inclination at all that we've got this all figured out or that we're the experts at this, but I do feel like there certainly are lessons that we have learned over the 25 years many more lessons that we will continue to learn. Each phase of parenting, each stage of own personal life and careers and schedules all bring new opportunities for us to learn awesome lessons. And so excited over these next couple of weeks to just dig in, I think we'll probably do about five a week, make this four or five weeks depending upon how it goes. But I just thought it would be fun to work through some of these. And before we get started I thought I'm just going to give you guys a little bit of a history into mine and my husband's story and that way you kind of know our background and where we came from.

Speaker 2:

But I moved from the South. I lived down in Arizona, a little bit in California for a while in my young years and in junior high moved North to a small community by the name of Freeport, illinois. One of the first weeks here we walked into a new church as a family of seven there's four sisters and myself and it was on that very first Sunday that I met my husband as a seventh grader in youth group. A couple of weeks after starting attending that church I found myself with a couple of my sisters on a youth group winter retreat, and that is where, you could say, I fell in love with the man that I get to call my husband now for 25 years. Obviously, the story has a lot of bumps and bruises, highs and lows. We obviously didn't start dating in junior high. I needed to wait until I was 16.

Speaker 2:

And so when I turned 16, I did indeed start dating Jed and we dated throughout high school, had a couple of breakups through college, we went to two different places to get our college education and so, just you know, some hardships in those times meant that he broke up with me once, I broke up with him once, but ultimately found ourselves back together as we were graduating college and were married the September after graduation. And so we did start our marriage young, after graduation, and so we did start our marriage young. We were 21 and 22 when we got married and have really had to grow up together, which I think has been great. It has created some hardships at times as we've had to navigate through just learning about our own selves, about being adults, about being parents, finding ourselves in our careers and just so many different seasons of life that we have been through. But being together 25 years, I feel like we have really learned how to navigate, how to be kind to one another and how to keep our relationship as a main priority for us, and for sure, there have been seasons where you're going to hear some of these lessons. We learned the lessons because we didn't do them the way that we might advise that somebody else now do them. In being able to look back in hindsight and say this is where we let the ball get too far ahead of us, and this is where we should have reined this in, or where we should have done this maybe a little bit differently, or we should have made our marriage a priority even in that really busy season. And so I just thought it would be kind of fun reflection for myself, a good reminder also just of where we've come from, the things that we need to be constantly working on to continue to grow in our marriage, and also, hopefully, some encouragement specifically to those of you that are younger and maybe just starting in on marriage and maybe in the really busy stages.

Speaker 2:

I'm trying to use the word busy less and less and use the word full, because I think there is a difference in how we hear that when we talk about life. When I say, oh, I'm so busy, it seems negative, it seems like just a list of to-dos, and really, when I look back on my life, on the stages that I would say were the busiest and for sure they were busy, but they were full. They were full of parenting, they were full of marriage, they were full of figuring out life and of responsibilities and of dreams. And, looking back, I think I've told a couple other friends that are in stages of having a lot of little kids, maybe in the 30s, where we're really chasing after careers and we have these little people all around us and there's a lot of sacrifice happening. I feel like that was one of the most difficult seasons of our marriage, just because of all the different things that were happening, and so I hope that this will be encouraging to those of you that are young married, that are just trying to get it all figured out and maybe are stuck on some things, and maybe one of these 25 lessons that we've learned will be of benefit to you or something that you could implement or even just shift the way that maybe you're thinking about something that is being a constant place of contention or of rub or frustration, and then also hope that it encourages those that are maybe in a place of feeling stuck or feeling discouraged, and just reminding you that your marriage is one of the greatest gifts that you will ever have on this earth and that it's worth the investment, it's worth putting every single thing you have into it to come out on the other side. If it's a struggle right now connection and continuing to navigate together and so excited just to jump into this. And some of these are really basic. Some of these, again, we've come upon because we have been struggling in an area and had to dig into it and read books or seek counsel, but I just hope that these encourage you. So I'm going to jump right in.

Speaker 2:

Lesson number one is you don't drift towards what you want. You have to be intentional, and I think we're really good about this when it comes to career, when it comes to health and nutrition, and I don't know that we spend a lot of time in life really digging in and saying what is it that we want in our marriage, what do we want in our relationship, what do we want in our communication, what do we want in the way that we interact with each other and the way that we spend time with each other and what do we want in 5 and 10 and 15 and 25 years from now for our marriage to look like? In the beginning of our marriage we certainly talked about some dreams and aspirations that we had for the future we would dream about when our kids came and some segments of our life. But really getting intentional, about focusing in on what do we want for our marriage, because we're in this stage now where we are obviously realizing there is a point in marriage where it's not just the fullness of family, it's not the kids at home and all the things happening we are getting very close. We're four years away from being in a place where it is just me and my husband at our home day in and day out, where it's just us going to dinner, it's just us on the weekends. Now obviously there will always be a revolving door of kids that are coming.

Speaker 2:

But really already talking about what do we want those years to look like? How do we want to navigate into those years so that we are best of friends, so that our communication is spot on, so that we have the same ideas and dreams about our careers and where they're going, or the borders and the boundaries that we're going to put on some of those things so they don't overtake our lives. And really, talking about that and being intentional, it's not just about our relationship, but it's also about goals with finances and health together. How are ways that we can work on our health together so that we are really able to be active grandparents and we can run around and we can play and we can do all of these things that are very important to us? We have to be working intentionally towards those things now. And so just really a reminder that you're not going to drift towards what you want. We're not just going to wake up one day and say, oh my gosh, we ended up exactly where we had always dreamed up, even though we didn't plan for it, we didn't work for it, we didn't write down goals and we didn't do check-ins to kind of re-navigate. So lesson number one is you don't drift towards what you want. You have to be intentional.

Speaker 2:

And I'm going to kind of put number lesson two and lesson three together, because it's a quote that I read a handful of years ago that impacted me so profoundly that it's something that I probably go back to for sure weekly, if not sometimes daily, and it was something that I read. I was working with my son, who's homeschooled, and we were reading through his logic book, maybe two years ago, and reading through just how we talk to people and how we process and just how we have conversations, how we bring about our point, how we speak truth. And the quote was and I'm going to say the whole quote, but then we're going to pop it into two different lessons. It's by a gentleman by the name of A Card Arnold I don't know if I'm saying that right that says truth without love kills, but love without truth lies, and so we're going to break that into two. The first one is lesson.

Speaker 2:

Number two is truth without love kills, and I think this is so important in marriage. It's important in absolutely any relationship. I remind myself of this when I'm communicating with my children, when I'm having conversations with friends, any time that there is something and I'm going to say a lot of times harder conversations. This isn't as difficult for us to implement when we're just having day-to-day surface conversation, but when we're having hard conversations, when there's issues that need to be addressed, when there's hurt, when there's things that need to be called on the carpet that need to be reconciled and forgiven and worked through. This quote has been so helpful to me and, when you look at it, truth without love killed. I think.

Speaker 2:

We always talk about the balance between truth and love. Well, I have to tell the truth. You also have to love people, and so does that mean we just love them and we don't tell truth? No, truth without love kills. So the first part of this is there's going to be times where we have to speak truth in our marriages. We have to have hard conversations, we have to talk about things that have come up, we have to talk about arguments that have happened or things from the past that continue maybe to creep in, but when we speak truth, we have to do it with love, because truth without love kills. If you've ever been in a conversation where you can say, well, it's the truth, right, and you're saying all these things that are super fruitful, you can literally see the person that you're talking to just totally melting.

Speaker 2:

I can think of conversations that I've had, even outside of marriage, where somebody might've been speaking something to me that was true, that I knew was maybe a weakness or something that I was struggling with, but it was presented to me that was true, that I knew was maybe a weakness or something that I was struggling with, but it was presented to me with absolutely zero love and, although I remember the message that was given, what I remember more was how I felt, how I felt so attacked, how I felt beaten up and abused and really how it fractured relationship. And so when we think about this, truth without love kills. It is so important in our marriages that we are able to speak truth, but that we are so cautious and so aware of the way that we deliver the truth and that it's done with so much love so that relationship is not killed, so that trust is built and not broken, so that it draws us closer to each other, not further apart. Right, and it might sound something like hey, I know you love me and I hope you know that I love you. I just have to talk about this specific situation because I sense that it's a point of contention, I sense that it's something where maybe you're getting stuck in your day-to-day life and I see it holding you back. And because I love you so much, because I know that this is keeping you from your full potential, because I see how this is tripping you up in this certain area of your life. I have to talk to you about it because I love you so much that I have to tell you the truth. But I want you to know that I want to be here with you, I want to work through that with you. I want to hold myself responsible for the parts that I play in that, how that is so much different than just nailing somebody with things that are true but delivering them without any love.

Speaker 2:

And so the second part of that is lesson number three, which is love without truth lies. And I think it can be easy in marriage, because we love somebody, or in our parenting, because we love our kids, to see things in them that are like ooh, that has a little bit, it's so funny, our kids, right now it must be a trend. It's like green flag, red flag, yellow flag, right. So if we do something cute in our marriage, if Jed opens the door for me, one of our daughters will be like oh, green flag, green flag, oh, that's so cute.

Speaker 2:

And I think in relationship there are times where we have yellow flags and red flags and we don't address them because we think, well, if I love them. It's just, it's who they are, it's what they are, it's how they've done it, it's just a part of them or it's not my problem. I love them, but I'm not going to talk about the things that need to be talked about. And the statement is love without truth lies. And when you really take time to think about that, that's powerful, that if I love you, I really really love you and I don't speak truth to you, I'm lying. I'm lying to you because I'm not being totally truthful about what I'm feeling, what I'm seeing. This could be even not being truthful about things that I need, or if I just say, well, you know, I know they love me, and so all these things that are happening that are being really hurtful to me, I'm just going to close my eyes to it because I love them. No, these are things that have to be talked about for us to have a healthy marriage. And so number three lesson is love without truth lies. So again, I'm going to say that whole quote is truth without love kills.

Speaker 2:

Lesson two and love without truth lies All right. Number four is the best gift that we can give our kids is a healthy marriage, and the quote by Andy Stanley that I absolutely love, says we strengthen our legacy when we strengthen our marriage and I know that in the fullness of life, the fullness of early marriage, the fullness of parenting and kids and just schedules that, it's very easy to backseat our marriage, it's very easy to have this assumption of they'll eventually be time for us, we'll eventually get to go on that date night, we'll eventually get to have a conversation. It's just not going to happen now because the job, the kids schedule, the sports, and there were seasons in our life where 100% the thing that always got taken off the calendar was our time together, was our prioritizing our relationship and sitting down and having the conversation or hiring the babysitter. Because in the fullness of life we just made the assumption we'll be fine, we can wait, we can put ourselves on the back burner or whatever. And the reality is I would have done that differently in our younger years.

Speaker 2:

I think when I look back on the younger years maybe the five to even 15 years of those years in marriage most of the friction and the rub that we had was because we had drifted, like we talked about in lesson one. We had drifted far enough to part apart in intimacy and intimacy. The example or the definition that I heard of that that I loved so much was intimacy stands for into me. You see, it's this closeness, it's. I know you so well that I can see into what your needs and your desires and your hurts and your motivations, what all those things are, and you can see those things into me.

Speaker 2:

And as we start to neglect our relationship, as we start to put ourselves on the back burner, that is when that intimacy starts to pull apart. And I'm not talking just about physical intimacy, I'm talking about really being on the same page and knowing where each other are at and checking in. And that is something that I would do different. I would have put some parameters in place in those early years to really protect the health of our marriage and to make it 100% a priority every day, every week. Now that doesn't mean that every day we're going to spend hours, but just to make sure that every day we are taking time to have that intimate connection of I'm seeing into you, I'm looking you in your eyes, I'm talking about your day, you're hearing what I'm struggling with, I'm seeing where you're excited. It's this closeness that helps us have a healthy marriage, and I know for sure that if I were to ask our kids all three of them in fact one of our kids came into our room last night because we're planning for this big trip Actually, when this podcast airs I will be in the air, heading to meet my husband for our big 12-day anniversary trip.

Speaker 2:

And one of our daughters came into our room last night because my husband has already left on the trip. I'm going to be meeting up with him after our work trip. And so she was coming in to kind of say her goodbyes and touch base for just some different things for the week. And she just said I just want to say thank you guys so much. Thank you guys so much for being married for 25 years. She said it is such a gift. I am so grateful and I really go have so much fun on your trip. We've got this. We are so excited that you guys get to go celebrate and we're so grateful for the gift that you guys have given us with your marriage.

Speaker 2:

And that quote we strengthen our legacy when we strengthen our marriage, when we invest in our marriage, when we make it that priority. It is a part of our legacy. It is a part of the stability of the framework of the scaffolding that's being built around the lives of our kids and how they look at marriage and how they look at relationship. And that doesn't mean that a healthy marriage means there's never conflict, there's never arguments, there's never hard days. But it means that when we have a healthy marriage they get to watch us wrestle through that, they get to watch us respect each other even when there's hardship. They get to see us always come back to center point of we're in this together. There is nothing that you guys need to fear. Mom and dad are good, mom and dad are together. Mom and dad are invested in making this marriage everything that we possibly can make it so that it feels safe, so that you want to be home, so that it's not a place of conflict, it's not a place of strife, it's a place of family and togetherness and kindness and communication.

Speaker 2:

And so if you're in a stage, maybe, of a lot of littles, or even maybe you're in more of the empty nest stage and you just have kind of drifted apart, I think, even as we get older, how we get to work on our marriage and what it says to our kids, I could very easily look at my kids and say here's ways that we didn't do marriage well in these years because we didn't make it a priority. And here's things that, because of wisdom and life and failing and getting back up, here's things that we've found really are important for us to have a healthy marriage. But we didn't always do it right and it's so cool that our kids get to watch part of that legacy being formed. So, number four the best gift we can give our kids is a healthy marriage. And then number five last one for this week is fill the gaps with grace, love and truth, and what I mean by that. This was something that my uncle talked when we had gone to him.

Speaker 2:

We often will meet with different people in our lives that are a little bit ahead of us, that we really love and admire and would be happy to emulate their marriages and just different aspects of life, and so we were talking with him at a stage where we were going through some difficulties and he said anytime that there is stories that you have or hurts that you have and there's gaps. There's gaps where you don't know the whole story. You don't know the whole truth, whether this be a big picture thing or a small picture thing is. Our natural human response is to create a story in our head that fills all the gaps with what we think to be truth. This is what they must be thinking. This is probably how they thought to this truth. This is what they must be thinking. This is probably how they thought to this decision. This is what they think about us.

Speaker 2:

It's a place where the gaps allow bitterness to set in, and it allows us to start to see people through a lens that might not be accurate, but something that we have created on our own and we write our own stories about what we think that is. And this can happen in big situations in conflict. This can also happen in the day-to-day of our marriage, and so in marriage, when we decide to fill the gaps that come up day-to-day this is so practical, day-to-day stuff when we fill the gaps with grace and love and truth over bitterness, resentment, assuming how that changes what happens in our brain. So a couple simple examples. One that I know I struggled with was when somebody says I'm going to be home at six o'clock and I'm a young mom and I've got all these littles and I haven't had any adult conversation all day and six o'clock comes and then 6.15, and then 6.30, and I'm calling and not answering their phone. Immediately my brain would want to go to he doesn't care about me, his family isn't a priority, he's a workaholic right.

Speaker 2:

All of these things that I would conjure up and I'd start to tell this story, I would let bitterness start to set in about I'm not a priority, the kids aren't a priority. You know all these different things that you can conjure up over something as simple as somebody's running a little behind. There was somebody that stopped him at the door on the way out the office. There was a super important phone call that came in, there was an errand that had to be done.

Speaker 2:

And I think when we can just start to put into practice that when that happens, as soon as the resentment or the bitterness or the frustration starts to set in, to immediately say, wait, in this gap, this gap of the unknown, I don't know what's happening to automatically go to grace and love and truth and say, man, I bet he's super stressed right now that he knows he's running late and yet he's on these calls that he has to get done. He's being pulled in a lot of directions and I'm just so grateful that he worked so hard for us. The grace part is that. The truth part is I know he would rather be home. I know that he's not choosing to take another call or to make another stop or to have another conversation in the hall before he comes home, and I know that when he gets home he's gonna be exhausted and he's gonna need us to just really love on him and encourage him and speak life over him.

Speaker 2:

And so just a simple situation where we go, when I don't have all the information, when I don't have all the information, when I don't know the little details that have happened to get me to this place, that might stir up in me a little bit of I have a lot of feelings about this to automatically take those negative feelings out of the gap and just insert grace and love and truth and assume the best about your partner. Because when I know what is true, when I know what my husband believes about me and our family, I should be able to very quickly say these lies that I'm choosing to believe right now. They're lies and I need to rewrite those stories before I let it create an entire narrative in my brain about all these things that are happening that are probably not even true.

Speaker 2:

And so again, lessons one through five. Number one you don't drift towards what you want, you have to be intentional. Number two truth without love kills. Number three love without truth lies. Number four the best gift we can give our kids is a healthy marriage, and we strengthen our legacy when we strengthen our marriage. And number five when in doubt, fill the gaps with grace and truth and love. So there you have it, guys, the first five lessons. I hope that you were able to take something from that and I'm excited to come back to you next week with five more.

Speaker 1:

So until next week, friends take care.