Seven Years and Counting

No, it's not our anniversary, but I just realized Daniel and I aren’t newlyweds anymore.

We were recently on a vacation weekend with his family coming off a week with my parents in town, a situation which in the past would have required lots of conversation time on our own to process everything that was going on. 

That’s what the first stage of marriage is all about: Sorting through life together and getting on the same page about what is going on around the two of you, what you think of it together, and how you are going to act as a couple in light of it. Boy is that ever a lot of work!   

We are finding that more of the situations we encounter as a couple are ones we have talked about before, and we have a kind of short-hand for revisiting them: a look, a phrase, a tilt of the eyebrow, a sleepy exchange before we drop off to sleep at night keeps us pretty much up to date now. All of the discovery was a lot of fun, and very tender, but it’s also a beautiful thing to have a lot of that sweat and work to become a couple behind us. Don't get me wrong, we still talk all the time, but now it seems like our work moving forward is more along the lines of thoughtful courtship of one another in the day to day chaos that characterizes life with the 2.5 kids and the house with the picket fence.   

That doesn't mean that things are all peaches and cream, but if we are getting on each other's nerves, it's likely not a misunderstanding. What we really need to work on is our connection. 

How would you define the current stage of your relationship? How has it changed since you got married? Do you have any great advice for the next 7?