What I've learned in 2 Years of Marriage - aka Happy Anniversary

Today is our 2 year wedding anniversary. We've been together a little over 5 years now at this point too. I'd like to sum up most of what I've learned about love, relationships and marriage using quotes/pictures I've found around the Internet (mostly Pinterest and Facebook).

Because of the way Facebook used to share pictures from my phone, I no longer have correct attribution for many of the photos. If you see your photo here, please contact me to have correct attribution added. Thanks!

It's very much about being a team. You go from "(s)he" and "me" to "we" when you get married. "(S)he" and "me" still exist, but so does this new thing called "we." It can be hard to navigate things if you're not prepared to also look out for "we." It's harder to survive when you have to look out for two (or more), but in the end the reward can be so much greater.

Love isn't easy. Really, it isn't. Once you have love, you have to make the choice to fight for it and fight through obstacles life tends to throw at you.

No one is perfect. Everyone has faults and everyone has issues. There's a reason you got together in the first place and those issues were probably there then too. Remember how you got through them in the beginning and remember why you even got together in the beginning.

Disappointment happens every day, not just in love but also in life. It's not always WHAT disappoints you that's the real issue. More often than not it's how you deal with that disappointment that ends up defining your relationships. It's also important to remember when YOU are disappointed that YOU have probably also disappointed someone else at some point.

So there you have it. I am in no way overly qualified to give advice in love or anything, but 2 years of marriage following 3 years of dating gives me a little credibility I think. Basically it comes down to the fact that it takes work to keep relationships going. You can't just sweep everything under a rug and hope it magically disappears. You can't just stop watering a tree because you think the root system is established enough to draw moisture from the ground.