Honest Reflections on Thirty-Six Years of Marriage
On the first of December, 1990, my wife Joy and I stood at the altar and said the words that would shape the rest of our lives. We were young, full of faith, full of dreams, and entirely unaware of just how much we did not yet know. This December marks thirty-six years since that day. Thirty-six years of one covenant, but countless graces. And as I look back now from this side of three decades together, I find myself wanting to share, honestly and pastorally, a few of the things I have come to believe make the difference between a marriage that simply endures and a marriage that genuinely flourishes.
I begin with a confession that has, more than anything else, kept our marriage healthy. Joy and I have always tried to be the same people at home that we are in the pulpit. The gap between the public and the private is where most marriages quietly die. When the man preaching about love on a Sunday is harsh with his wife on a Monday, when the woman testifying to the goodness of God in the foyer is bitter in the kitchen, the soul of the marriage begins to leak. Authenticity is not a personality trait. It is a discipline. And it has been, for us, one of the most important disciplines of the marriage covenant.
Scripture frames marriage in language that the modern world has almost entirely forgotten. The prophet Malachi, rebuking a generation that had grown casual about their wedding vows, wrote, “Yet she is your companion and your wife by covenant” (Malachi 2:14, NKJV). Notice the order. Companion comes before covenant. The legal weight of marriage is real, but it is meant to rest on the deeper foundation of companionship, of friendship, of genuinely liking the person you have chosen to walk through life with.
Our culture has tried for decades to reduce marriage to a contract, a transaction of mutual benefit that can be dissolved when the benefits diminish. But Scripture insists that marriage is something far more sacred. A contract is built on what you can get. A covenant is built on what you can give. A contract asks, “What do I get out of this?” A covenant asks, “What can I lay down for this?” I have watched, over thirty-six years and decades of pastoring, what happens to marriages built on the wrong foundation. The contract crumbles under the first real pressure. The covenant deepens.
Here, then, are a few of the things I would tell any couple, young or old, who wants their marriage to last and to flourish.
Choose her again every morning. The vow you took on your wedding day was not a one-time decision; it was the first of tens of thousands of decisions. The strongest marriages I know are the ones where both partners keep choosing each other, daily, deliberately, joyfully. “He who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favour from the LORD” (Proverbs 18:22, NKJV). You found her once. Find her again. Every day.
Guard your friendship. Romance is wonderful, but romance without friendship is exhausting. The marriages that go the distance are the ones where the husband and wife actually like one another. They share inside jokes. They laugh at the same things. They enjoy quiet evenings together that require no event, no programme, no excitement. Solomon wrote that “two are better than one… and a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:9, 12, NKJV). That threefold cord is you, your spouse, and the Lord and it is woven daily in the small, ordinary moments of companionship.
Cultivate a shared spiritual life, though it may not always look quite the way you imagine it should. Joy and I have each treasured our own private times with the Lord across these thirty-six years; our own walk, our own quiet hours in His presence, our own conversations with the Father. We also pray together, although I confess that is one area where I have often felt we could do better than we actually do. But here is what I have come to see as deeply formative in our marriage: we talk constantly around the Word. We share what the Lord has shown each of us through a passage of Scripture, what is provoking us, what is challenging us, what is feeding us. A marriage where Scripture is the running conversation has a depth and a strength that the world cannot imitate. The Spirit who knits two lives together also keeps them woven, and one of the chief ways He does that is by allowing the Word to become a shared language between two hearts.
Forgive quickly and apologise faster. The marriages that drown are the ones where offences are stored up like ammunition. The marriages that thrive are the ones where, when one has “a complaint against another” (Colossians 3:13, NKJV), it is dealt with before the sun goes down. Pride is the great destroyer of marriages, and humility is its great healer. Learn to say, “I was wrong, please forgive me,” without flinching. Those six words have saved more marriages than any counsellor ever has.
And finally, never stop being honest with each other. Scripture calls us to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15, NKJV). Both halves matter. Truth without love wounds. Love without truth flatters. The strongest couples I know have learned, over the years, how to tell each other the hard things gently, without weaponising them, and without softening them into uselessness. Honesty, woven into love, is one of the great quiet gifts of a long marriage.
There are no perfect marriages, only honest ones. There are no flawless husbands or wives, only those who keep choosing grace over grudge, presence over performance, and covenant over convenience.
Thirty-six years in, I can tell you that the secrets to a happy marriage are not really secrets at all.
They are slow, faithful disciplines, applied over thousands of ordinary days, sustained by the grace of God and the friendship of the one who said yes to you on a long-ago December morning.
One covenant.
Countless graces.
That is enough to build a life on, and it is enough to build a legacy on.
