When Teammates Aren't Enough

One of the tough reality checks during this process was coming to grips with the fact that our life and priorities were totally out of whack.  

You are married to a good person, you live in a comfortable home, you work in a profession that you enjoy and has meaning,  you love your child, you have your health... what is there to complain about? In a seemingly "great" life, it's hard to really own the fact that although you love the different parts of your life, when you put it all together it's not a life you love.

How does that happen?  How can you love the parts of your life, but not the whole?  It happens when you are not living your life in congruence with your priorities.

It's really easy to say that your relationships with God, your spouse, and your family are the most important things in your life, but are they really?  When you get real about the way you spend your time, how you use your energy, and where you invest your resources, does it match what you say your priorities are?  For us, they didn't.

From the outside, things looked really good.  We were a great team...supporting one another, cheering on one another, covering child care while the other trained, and then swapping.  Sometimes, one would train in the morning and the other would train in the afternoon, then we would grab dinner and sit across from one another on our computers as we answered emails and perused social sites. We were good...training partners...teammates...roommates...but not necessarily a couple.  We mastered the schedule, or rather, the schedule was our master.

Don't get me wrong, having a teammate you can trust and count on and know that they have your back is great...but you typically don't marry them.  You meet them for a few hours a week when the team comes together to figure out how to perform as task as a unit.  But have you ever tried living with your teammates for any duration of time?  "Tolerating" and "being in love with" are pretty far apart on the relationship spectrum.

One of the harsh realities was that there was too much investment in our hobby of triathlon.  We spent a lot of our time, energy, and resources planning, training, racing, traveling, maintaining equipment, logging, communicating with sponsors, volunteering with our triathlon club, putting on events, etc.  Before we knew it, triathlon had the largest piece of our pie.  It became easy to justify because we did lots of our training together, were still very involved parents, traveled as a family, and spent a lot of time with friends during our training.  But that wasn't being honest with ourselves.

We also were guilty of putting our daughter before our marriage.  We found many, many hours to play/read/draw/dress-up/spend time with her, but never made that time for each other.  We sat through every swim practice, every ballet practice, every soccer game, every school conference... we even adjusted our whole lifestyle so that Jessi could stay home 2 days a week with Emma.  But in looking back, we were depriving her of one of the greatest gifts we could ever give her, parents who invested in each other the way we would hope and pray that her spouse would invest in her. 

Truth be told, when we peeled away the excuses, we were failing.

Even though so much of what we were doing was good, even at times great, we weren't honoring God with our commitment to our marriage.  We put each other and our marriage on the back burner and justified it with the fact that we were being good parents by spending quality time with our child, honoring our athletic talents, putting on great community events to promote health and fitness, and volunteering to help children.  

But even great things, when prioritized higher than your marriage, become not-so-great.

So what did we learn from all of this?  When we looked at our calendars and schedules, they should be a reflection of our priorities.  Our children/work/hobbies should not be at the top of the list, even though they are extremely important and an essential piece of the pie.  Giving our marriage the "leftovers" was a critical mistake.

As a part of this amazing journey of rebuilding, we have learned to design our life with our marriage at the forefront, giving our time and energy to that first.  And in doing so, it's amazing how there's more energy for other parts of our lives.  When our marriage is nourished with the energy and time it needs to thrive, we work as a united team and everything else in life just seems better, brighter, happier, and easier to manage.