Nothing worth having :

   Marriage: While to some it is a concept, an idea, an event; to me it is a living breathing organism. 
   It's amazing, its terrifying, its freaking hard. Marriage is rewarding and exhausting and infuriating and fabulous all at once, and if you feed it, it will be one of the best things you have ever done, but if you neglect it, it will die.
   Now, lets pause for a minute, what do I know? I have only been married for 5 years. I have also been on both ends of everything I just said in that time, and I have talked to a LOT of people on the subject. Why? because its important to me. I value it, to me it was not a decision I made on October 11, 2008. It is a decision I make every single day.  I have to wake up every day and decide to be married to the man that both feeds all of the wonderful parts of me, lifts me up and stands beside me no matter what decisions I make and pushes me to grow, to be better. I also have to decide to be married to the man who never replaces the toilet paper roll, or does laundry, or closes the cabinets in the kitchen. The man who will argue with me even when we agree, and leaves his shoes in the middle of the floor every single day no matter how many time I complain about it.
   I wake up and have to commit to doing the things I agreed to on that day, to love him, and only him. To follow him, to trust him, to forgive him and to try my very best to make him happy. In our time together we have done a lot, we have moved more times than I want to admit, we have had 3 beautiful children, we gave one to heaven, we bought a house and 2 cars, we acquired 3 animals and lost a few fish along the way. We have opened our home to my mother and my sister, we started a business, we discovered our faith and we nearly fell apart in the process. Because with all of this going on, we forgot that we had to keep feeding our marriage. It won't wait for you, we had to be reminded of that a few times. 
   Marriage has to be a priority. You have to learn what your spouse needs, whether it be words of kindness and respect, or simply quality time together. The book The 5 Love Languages helped us discover that for ourselves. It also taught us how to be better parents, but once we learned what we were doing wrong we learned how to fix it, with a lot of guidance along the way, and a lot of tears on my behalf. But here is the thing...
     My husband is the most amazing man in the world in my eyes. Even on our worst days I would not wake up and chose to be married to anyone else. I could not imagine living my life without the silly text messages and the smiles he gives me. I could not imagine living without hearing his voice when I feel like I am falling apart, and while I am fully aware that I can't fully predict what the future has in store for us, I can tell you this. I intend to feed my marriage until it is fat and happy, even when I don't feel like I have anything left to give. I am prepared to regroup every once in a while, I am prepared to get down on my knees and pray for what I want, for what I need. I am sure that we will fight and disagree, but I am also sure that we will make it through, because we are both on the same page.  And that page is And They Lived Happily Ever After.
   While I believe that everyone makes their own decisions, for their own reasons, and I do not believe that I am better than anyone else, I do disagree with jumping into a marriage. I disagree with the notion of "we can just get a divorce if it doesn't work" and "well he stopped trying so I did too"
I believe in fighting for what you want, fighting and standing for what you believe in, and not giving up when the going gets tough. I also believe that its never too late.
   I want my children to grow up seeing us in love, and I don't think that loving someone is enough to keep a marriage going, I think that being IN love takes effort to keep, but that effort is worth it. I want my children to find an everlasting love, a true, honest love based on the principles of forever, and that may take some effort and resistance on their part since the world has given up on the notion of taking your time, completing the things you start and doing things right the first time. But I believe that if I can show them how a marriage should be, by seeking out marriages that I want to model after and always looking for a way to improve, then one day they will know what they are looking for and not give up before they find it.
   My marriage is worth having, and therefore worth trying for and seeking out and working towards, and theirs will be too.