Like any good love story, our “happily ever after” wasn’t straightforward. 

For one thing, we lived in different countries. I was English, she was German. Her parents were church pastors, mine were agnostic. 

We fell in love without really meaning to, through a music chat room. I had a girlfriend, a pretty punk girl at the local art college, who I’d happily dated for two years. Still, rather than go out with my girlfriend, I’d go online to chat with this mysterious girl who called herself “Franny” (after a J.D. Salinger story). 

Franny and I soon started talking for hours every night on the telephone, out of my frustration for her slow typing skills. We went from chatting casually about bands to intense all-night conversations about life. She mentioned she was a Christian and, being brought up as a tolerant liberal, I told her that was great, but not really for me. 

I never imagined my life would be transformed in the way it has by the love of Jesus. 

Franny and I would share funny stories about ourselves and our hopes for the future. I’d never felt so connected and close to someone, someone whom I wouldn’t recognize if she walked past me on the street. 

A few months later, my girlfriend broke up with me claiming, rightly, we were drifting apart.

The wedding vows were fresh and true. What could possibly go wrong? Stephen Maughan

Hamburg and Beyond

Franny invited me to spend a week with her. So, I flew to Hamburg, not speaking any German, looking for a girl I had never seen before, but was in love with the gentle sound of her telephone voice.

I had never been so nervous in my life as the plane landed and I made my way through customs. I saw her approach me with a bottle of mineral water (our sign so we’d recognize each other) and my heart melted. 

We spent an intoxicating week walking the city streets and getting to know each other. Five months later, we were married. 

She was 18, and I was 23. 

It felt as though we had our whole lives in front of us. The wedding vows were fresh and true—in sickness and in health, richer or poorer, we would love and cherish each other. 

What could possibly go wrong?

Cookies in the Cupboard

Here’s usually the part where the credits roll and the curtain falls. Nobody wants to hear what happens after happily ever after. Loneliness, regret and arguments are just a few of the things that can happen in married life, particularly when you marry young and you’re still figuring out who you really are and what you want out of life.

Thankfully, my wife and I are still passionately in love and happy. The old-fashioned view, and one that I agree with, is that marriage is for life. Something based on pure emotions isn’t likely to stand the test of time. 

The secret to a happy marriage is not just the usual bit about being good friends; you need biblical values, such as honesty, trust and respect. In any relationship, you are exposed to the other person 24-7. There’s no hiding. She will see you lose your temper with the mail carrier for walking over your grass; he will notice your secret stash of cookies in the cupboard. 

Sharing Is Caring

Shared interests are something you are either going to have or not. You can get away with pretending you really enjoy her traditional worship music, but she’ll catch you out yawning one day. 

My wife and I have many different hobbies. I enjoy reading novels; she doesn’t read but spends her spare afternoons at the art gallery, which I just don’t get. She could, and has, dragged me through some of the most prestigious art galleries in the world—and I wonder if I can make it home in time for the game. 

But saying that I love the way a painting can make her so happy, her eyes will twinkle, and she’ll seem twice as sweet and pretty to me. 

If we have different interests, something that has kept us together is we have the same attitude and goals in life. We make time to pray and seek God together, and we have the same ideas about what kind of life we want. This has connected us and brought us closer together and made things easier when hard times come.

Happy, Loving, Fulfilling

And hard times will come, no matter how perfect your wedding day was. For us, that has meant bringing up two boys, one with autism. It’s when I lost my job last year, and we couldn’t pay the bills. It’s times like those that I really appreciate the beauty and value of prayer, trust in God, and the amazing love in those sacred marriage vows, which feel as fresh and exciting today as the day we took them. 

There are many excellent Christian books available offering advice to married couples, but I think fundamentally it comes down to putting your complete trust in God being in control of all things, including your marriage, and that we can rely on God. In the New Testament, John puts it’s beautifully when he writes, “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16). 

God has a plan and is with us. He wants us to be happy, and our marriages to be loving and fulfilling. A “happily ever after” indeed!

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