The Second Happy by Pastor Kevin MyersPrøve

You Can Find a Better Happiness

Everyone wants a happy marriage. And nearly all marriages start out happy. Our marriage was no different. It started out happy as we enjoyed a honeymoon season, but it didn’t take long to lose a lot of that happiness. We think that’s pretty typical of marriages—or at least 99 percent of them. 

For most of us, we become less happy with our marriage as time goes along. It’s a lot like the way most of us feel about our houses after some time has passed. For example, when our kids were young, we became unhappy with the house we were living in, so Marcia and I went searching for a new one, specifically one with a big front yard for the kids. We found it, and we loved it—for a while. But the truth was that the master bathroom was small. I mean really small. The forty-two square foot space (it was seven feet by six feet) included a toilet, a shower, a sink, and a linen closet. We accepted that cramped footprint at first, but over time we became less happy with it.

What did we do? We sold it and moved into a new house. We were so happy. But after living there for a decade or so, parts of it became dated. Other parts were worn out. We started to get irritated by its flaws. So we had to make a decision: What were we going to do about it?

Rather than moving again, we chose to invest in the house and improve it. Over the last few years, we’ve renovated the master bathroom and closet, the kitchen, parts of the living room, and the basement. And guess what? We fell back in love with our house. We discovered the Second Happy in the same house.

The same thing can happen with a marriage. You may have become less happy with it than you were when you started. But here’s the great news: You don’t need to end your marriage and look for another one to be happy again. You just need to invest in the relationship you have to find the Second Happy. That’s really the way God designed marriage to be anyway—lasting and fulfilling.

Prayer: God, help my spouse and me to remodel our relationship so that with your help we discover the Second Happy in our marriage.