We hit a significant marital milestone this year, though the actual day of our anniversary came and went without much fanfare. We were at a missions conference and were only able to escape for a couple hours, skipping an afternoon session to take a walk together in the July heat. It didn’t feel special or remarkable, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. I had expected to feel something.
It was only after I returned home that I was able to reflect on twenty-five years of holy matrimony. There are ups and downs in every marriage, but for the first eighteen years, I would have said we had more ups than downs. I didn’t really have a construct for anything different.
The last several years have challenged my assumptions about wedded bliss. I thought we would always be as happy as we had been, and without much extra effort. Because those first eighteen years or so felt relatively effortless. We got along well, and we spent a lot of time together, and we enjoyed each other. We’d been friends since we were fifteen. We thought we knew each other, and we thought we knew how to do this marriage thing.
Until midlife.
I didn’t know it at the time, but when my anxiety skyrocketed in our last couple years overseas, that was probably the beginning of perimenopause. The hormonal shifts of my late thirties triggered both health and mental health concerns, and these things spilled over into our marriage. I’d always been a worrier, but it was something both he and I could laugh off. This iteration of anxiety interfered with our relationship.
I was working on my issues, slowly finding some answers for both my body and my mind, when the pandemic erupted. And just like that, everything changed. We unexpectedly repatriated. Everything felt uncertain. The emotions of re-entry got all tangled up with fluctuating hormones, magnifying every feeling of sadness or anger or confusion.
My husband didn’t recognize the woman in front of him. She still bore his name but barely resembled the girl he’d fallen so deeply in love with. What happened to her peace, her identity, her quirky confidence, her unshakeable faith? Re-entry is notorious for identity shifts, and so are menopause and midlife. Experiencing them all at the same time was a recipe for marital disaster.
I know now that it is no small feat to drag a marriage across the perimenopause finish line. Everything conspires against you. The fatigue is unreal. I’m so tired—too tired for physical intimacy, too tired for deep emotional work, too tired for normal daily activities. Though friends are an important part of my life, social events exhaust me even more than they used to. And I’m often too worn out for exercise—there goes my stress relief!
And the rage. It’s not as bad now, but when I was taking micronized progesterone to help with other symptoms, my pre-menstrual anger was uncontrollable. Eventually I stopped taking the “poison pills” as we called them (for me — they work for some women), and suddenly I could manage my mood swings much better. It’s a rare day now that I lose my temper. But I know some women struggle with PMDD (pre-menstrual dysphoria disorder) simply due to the hormonal shifts themselves. They can’t just stop taking a pill and stabilize their emotions or improve their relationships.
The truth is, women’s mental health is uniquely fragile with all the hormone fluctuations we go through. In addition to the normal monthly ups and downs, there’s pregnancy, postpartum, and perimenopause—times when we’re especially vulnerable. It’s a pretty big deal to stay married to the same person through all those storms.
Over the years my husband, who served as a pastoral counselor for ten years and is now a clinical counselor, has spoken with a lot of men who worry about their wives’ mental health. They feel powerless in the face of these challenges but desperately want to help. This is especially true after kids. We adore our children, but motherhood takes a toll, and we don’t always act like the same girl our husband fell in love with.
Which is precisely why we make those vows. We promise constancy before we know the full cost of faithfulness. A marriage that lasts through the decades requires an understanding that it’s not always us talking, but our hormones.
Midlife isn’t just about changing hormones though. It’s also about changing roles and routines. Figuring out who you are as your children grow up is complicated. No longer am I mainly Mommy. I loved that title, loved that role. Staying home with my kids and homeschooling them was such a gift. It became a huge part of my identity, but with two kids in college and another about to launch, that identity is shifting even now.
So I’m figuring out how to be a mom to older kids. Figuring out how to let them go and somehow still keep connected. How to be proud of them and guide them in just the right amounts and just the right way. I’m figuring out how to have work-life balance—something I never thought I would need because I never thought I would have a career. And I’m seeing my own mother in a whole new light.
I’m figuring out who I am as an individual person, not just someone’s wife or mom. Midlife is notorious for women “finding themselves” — and then leaving their husbands. And so these shifts feel scary sometimes, for both husband and wife.
But if I’m a person made in the image of God, just like my husband, just like my children, then this identity stuff is important work, holy work. Am I the same girl I was at age ten, twenty, thirty? What has changed, what has remained? Can I be both more independent and more interconnected at the same time?
All of this points to the necessity of going on dates in midlife. Regular dates are so important for keeping connected when your children are little. Kids are loud and take up all the space in a house, and if you’re not careful, you’ll lose touch with each other. It sometimes feels impossible to leave the house together when children are young, but it’s a key aspect of a thriving marriage (just ask marriage researcher John Gottman).
As children grow, you would think a quieter house would make connection easier, but you actually have less automatically gluing you together as joint heads of the household. So you need even more of a reminder of who you are as a couple and why you decided to get together in the first place. And you need time to grow closer, especially as the demands on your time increase in number and complexity.
I’m feeling this, even though we don’t have the top bun of the proverbial “sandwich generation.” We’re only trying to parent teenagers and launch young adults. We’re not taking care of parents. For him, that’s because his parents went to be with Jesus long ago; for me it’s because my parents are in good health.
So we make it a habit to go on dates every week. It’s in the calendar, and we don’t skip anymore. This past summer when all four of our kids were home, we sometimes let date night slide, but we lost track of each other, even if we were together spending that time with our family. The truth is, marriage needs a lot of time to thrive. That’s not just my experience though; that’s backed up by data (again, see John Gottman).
In fact, we don’t just go on these now-nonnegotiable weekly dates. We also set aside time once a quarter to get away for the weekend—or even just an overnight. Thankfully we’ve found a couple inexpensive Airbnbs in our area, but it was even cheaper to do this when we lived overseas. (Granted, we lived in a city in a developing country, which made local hotels both accessible and affordable.)
And then there’s the spiritual stuff. By the time you get to twenty-five years of marriage, you’ve endured a lot of suffering. On your own, with your spouse, because of your spouse. If you haven’t already, you start asking questions about all this suffering, about all the things you thought were supposed to happen but didn’t. About the silence of God and all those unanswered prayers.
For a couple years during the pandemic I wasn’t sure about this whole Jesus thing. My faith had been so severely shaken by politics and corrupt Christian leaders that I wasn’t sure I wanted my name associated with religion. In reality I was angry with God, so I tried to pretend He didn’t exist. But I was lonely, and I was desperate, and in a way I cut myself off from the one resource that could have helped — God. Was I going to return to my roots, to who I am in Christ? Or was I going to let something shake a foundation I once thought was so firm?
I thought I could manage this faith shift on my own, but when one person in a marriage has a faith crisis, the marriage has a faith crisis. Because there’s no way to keep our choices and belief systems from affecting the person we share a bedroom with. When your relationship is built on a shared love for God, and one person struggles with faith, the marriage foundation falters, even if you still like each other.
And I did like him — when the progesterone wasn’t soaring, that is. I wanted to be happy with him. We had always been so happy, and I thought we could still be happy even when I wasn’t happy. I had been unhappy for so long without realizing it. Multiple factors contributed, like hormonal fluctuations, repatriation, the news cycle, technology use, a new career for both him and me, and watching our children leave the nest.
But a couple can’t be happy together if one person is so unhappy. All of a sudden one day I realized why he had been so unhappy at times. Jonathan also wanted to be happy together, but we couldn’t be if I were still in the state I’d been in for several years. Once we named this problem, we could start working on the various solution strands.
Honestly I didn’t realize midlife was going to be so much work. Everything was easier when I was younger. Faith, love, energy, thinking, planning, dreaming. But if I want to be happy — and I do — then I have to ask myself if I am willing to put in the effort it takes. And the answer is yes.
In a way I’m saying the same things I always did: If you want your marriage to be good, you have to spend a lot of time together. You have to root yourself in Christ, make God the center of your life, the center of your relationship. I realize it makes me sound like an old church lady, saying you need Christ as the center of a marriage. Then again I always did love to hear Jonathan talk in Bible class. It’s how I fell in love with him as a teenager, listening to him in Sunday school.
But while I might be saying the same things, in a way it’s much different. It’s harder. You have to fight for it. Fight for your faith, fight for your marriage, fight for your friendship. You have pain in your story that wasn’t there in the beginning. Pain with each other, pain with God. Your eyes are open to the non-fairy-tale reality of married life, and the choice to be faithful to each other means more.
In the beginning it was all fun and games to be together. Spending time with each other was all you wanted to do. But after two or three or more decades, you’ve walked through a lot of hardship together. You’ve seen a lot of suffering. And you’ve had to forgive each other for a lot. After twenty-five years of marriage, I still have the same message that I always had, but it’s spoken through fire. It’s been tested and refined and even frayed at times. But it’s still here.
A few days after we returned from that conference, we went on a date. It had been a while. But I remember looking at him and thinking, “Oh, there you are. And I still like you.”
So my dearest Jonathan, from the first decade to the last — and all the ones in between — you’re still the one I want. You’re still the one I love. You’re still the one I choose. I promised you my faithfulness on a hot July day at the turn of the century, and even after everything we’ve been through, I would promise it all over again. Starting now.
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If you’re living overseas and have limited access to counseling or other marriage help, Jonathan Trotter created this self-paced marriage resource that corresponds to the material in Dr. Sue Johnson and Kenneth Sanderfer’s book Created for Connection. The “Created for Connection Roadmap,” as he calls it, forms the basis for much of his work in counseling couples and has also formed the structure for marriage classes and retreats that we have co-led.
