Best challenge of 2009

Something that really made you grow this year. That made you go to your edge and then some. What made it the best challenge of the year for you?


This is definitely a good question for me as this whole year has been a great challenge.
But the biggest one, the one that forced me to grow would be getting engaged to David. Knowing you are going to spend the rest of your life (and I'm like that...it WILL be the rest of our lives.) with someone forces you to look at yourself and how you interact with them.

We starting meeting with our pastor friend even before the engagement was a reality. We knew we would eventually be getting engaged so we went ahead and started to meetings about how to prepare for marriage. We were advised to complete an online quiz to evaluate our personalities and interactions. The results have greatly helped us to become better. We have huge gaps in our conflict resolution and communication methods...basically opposite ends of the spectrum. So this forces us to take a good look at these aspects and how we can work on them to improve and make our future easier and more bearable.

So, from meeting with our pastor we've been meeting with our amazing mentor couple, who have also had some great questions for us to evaluate ourselves and see how we can better honour each other and God and the lot.

Basically it comes down to this. I yell when I get upset, I get all dramatic and loud and scream and throw things. David doesn't. I'll storm off and ignore and be all emotional. David doesn't. I need time to calm down, David needs to resolve the issue RIGHT NOW. These are things that will not allow our marriage to work long term. So the time to fix them is now.

Integral to this is me working on my half...obviously. David has done a lot better with working on this stuff than me. But I'm starting to actually try. For a while I had it in my head that I fought normally and he was the weird one....needless to say this isn't true. There really isn't any resolution when I go running and screaming around the house. So as of extremely late I've been working on my communication with him and really working on staying calmer...it really doesn't help when David says something smart ass like "Calm down..." that will just set me off b/c I'm usually quite calm, or calmER than I used to be so it doesn't help. But I feel that I'm slowly coming along, which is good b/c all I can do is work on it in the hopes we'll have a good and calm marriage..I really hope to be more like our marriage mentors. They just seem to have it all together. I'm not saying they're perfect, obviously no one is, but they've just gone about things the right way and that's something I want to do also. Be slow to anger...that's my new motto.

All in all that's my biggest challenge this year (and definitely on going for..probably ever) it's not changing myself for another person, but improving on areas that could make life more difficult than it needs to be. Also I just want to be nicer to David...he is beyond an amazing person, boy, guy, friend, fiance...just everything. He deserves to be treated with respect and love and I want to do that. So it's been a year of challenges. But not unwelcome :) and I can only hope they continue to challenge and improve me in 2010