Married Love: Keys to a Happy, Successful Marriage

I have accomplished 6 months of marriage.  These six months have been the most challenging and happiest time of my life.  I have learned some things to do and things not to do; I am always eager to learn from the solid marriages around me on how I can build a healthy, fantastically fun marriage. Marriage is not to be endured but savoured. There are so many facets to love and ways to do marriage well. Here I will be sharing the answers from a few friends to whom I posed the question, "What makes your marriage a success?"

Jeff and Leora.
These two do love right.  It's better than any movie script or story book.

Me and Jeff and our love of Fun.

One of the reasons I love being married, and love being married to Jeff, is that we have so much FUN together. We play games on the subway into work. We have secret languages, like Pig Latin but infinitely cooler. We dare each other to do silly things to make the other person laugh. We started a band called The Weathering, so spend a lot of our time being creative and imaginative. We've called the day after Thanksgiving "Peppermint Winter Day" and make apple butter the night before, wake up, light peppermint incense, eat the apple butter, write each other a letter and dance to a song by Over the Rhine. In that order. We try to scare each other by turning off the lights and jumping out of closets. 

We just have fun. Lots and lots of fun. 

Of course, there's a lot more to marriage than fun - like commitment and God and the Bible and sacrifice and sadness and dying to yourself and all that. But, having fun is probably one of our greatest strengths. 

I haven't learned a lot in my 1 year of marriage, but I'm pretty sure a lesson to live by is the invaluable spirit of laughter.