I want to welcome my newest contributor here at A Virtuous Woman, Becky Moseley from Tales of Beauty from Ashes as she talks about setting goals for marriage with us!

Setting Marriage Goals

When my husband and I first got married, it was a dream come true. He was better than I ever could have imagined. He was kind, thoughtful and just so…dreamy.

He was my true knight in shining armor. 

As the months wore on and the label of newlywed slowly fell off us, like an old sticker, things got a little harder. My husband and I were still madly in love, but sometimes, we argued over silly things.

A few years into the marriage, a baby came.

Then, another.

One day, I looked at my knight in shining armor and noticed that his armor wasn’t so shiny. Rather, he looked like a haggard knight in dusty, rusty armor. So what happened? Did my husband change? Did I change?

Life happened.

When I dated my husband and even when we were first married, I made a huge effort to study my man. I wanted to know how he thought, what he liked, why he did things. I wanted to please him. I wanted to take it my mission to love him with all I had in me and be the best wife I could be. I worked at learning about how to be a wife of integrity. I studied, I prayed, I longed to grow.

But then, life happened.

I started thinking about myself more. Rather than wondering what he was thinking or how I could serve him, my thoughts started shifting to how he wasn’t meeting MY needs. I started caring more about things I was interested in than my marriage or my husband’s interests. I didn’t put in the work needed to make our marriage great.

[Tweet “Like a piece of armor gets dusty over time, marriage can become rusted, if we don’t work at it.”]

Here’s the thing. Marriage is hard. It takes work. If you aren’t working on your marriage to make it better, then it is probably getting worse. Just as a piece of armor gets dusty over time, so our marriages can grow layers of dust and become rusted, if we don’t continue to work and maintain them.

This year, I set goals for my marriage. I am committing to reading a marriage book each month. I want to make my marriage better; I want to focus on serving my husband more than myself.

I am committing to spend time each day with my spouse, talking and learning about him. What about you and your marriage? Do you have goals for your marriage?

If you are interested in challenging yourself to make your marriage better, I want to recommend you read my new e-book, The 30 Day Marriage Challenge. It is filled with daily challenges to take your marriage from mediocre to amazing. I wrote this book to challenge myself to become a better wife.

For a whole month, I worked on something daily to make my marriage better and my husband noticed. He started commenting on how fun our marriage was. He mentioned how grateful he was to have me for a wife. I could see a huge difference in how our marriage was at the beginning of this challenge and the end.

So I wrote this book for me and my marriage, but I published it for you and yours. Be forewarned, the challenges aren’t always easy. Sometimes they are hard, other times they take vulnerability and humility.

But they are so worth it. Please consider checking out my e-book for sale today at Amazon.

Becky traded in her teaching degree for diapers and dishes. Her blog, Tales of Beauty for Ashes, has tricks for anything from how to have a better marriage, to a better way to organize measuring cups. When not writing, you might find her reading a book, playing in the kitchen or loving on her family. Find her on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.