7 hours ago
1
The day after Ada’s wedding, she woke up and looked at her husband like, “So this is it?”
There was no sudden beam of light from heaven, no choir singing in the background. Just two adults sitting on a bed, wondering what to eat for breakfast and how to start this new chapter called forever.
Before marriage, Ada thought she knew who she was. She had plans, structure, and a list of things she wanted to achieve by a certain age. She knew the kind of wife she wanted to be – supportive, prayerful, and emotionally stable. But marriage has a funny way of humbling your expectations. It shows you that love alone isn’t enough, and good intentions don’t automatically translate to good communication.
Nobody really tells you how marriage will strip away the polished version of yourself that the world sees. It will show you your impatience, your pride, your triggers and your tendency to withdraw when things get tough. You’ll realise that love is not sustained by butterflies, but by forgiveness, discipline, and an uncomfortable level of self-awareness.
In those early years, Ada wanted everything to move fast. She wanted harmony, financial stability and perfect communication. But growth doesn’t work like that. Growth in marriage is slow, unglamorous, and often uncomfortable. Two people learning to merge their histories, temperaments, and expectations under one roof, sometimes gracefully, sometimes clumsily. There was a season Ada thought their marriage was “struggling. But they weren’t. They were simply growing.
She would later realise that most people marry before fully understanding who they are. And that’s not always a mistake; it’s just life. You learn who you are inside commitment, not outside it. You discover your capacity for patience, empathy and resilience only when real-life challenges test you.
One day, during a random disagreement about something as trivial as laundry, a realisation occurred to Ada: marriage isn’t about perfection; it’s about partnership. It’s about learning to work through differences, not wish them away. It’s about growing together, not apart. Because when two flawed humans commit to loving each other daily, they will eventually bump into parts of themselves they didn’t even know existed. The real growth happens in the tension, in the forgiveness, in the decision to try again.
Over time, Ada learned that marriage is more like a mirror than a medal. It doesn’t reward you for who you were before the wedding; instead, it reflects who you are becoming while in it. You cannot outsource emotional maturity.
Prayer and counselling can help, but you still need to put in the hard work of unlearning, listening, and relearning. Growth occurs in everyday moments—not during anniversaries or vacations, but in those small instances when you choose grace over pride, or laughter over irritation..
So if you ever feel like you’ve lost yourself in marriage, maybe you’re not lost. Maybe you’re evolving into a wiser, softer, more grounded version of yourself.
Nobody arrives in a marriage ready; you grow ready. And somewhere between the misunderstandings, the shared laughter, the compromises, and those late-night conversations about bills and dreams, you’ll find rhythm. It won’t happen overnight, but it will come. Marriage won’t complete you, but it will reveal you. And if you stay open, it will grow you.
The post Rita Chidinma: How Love and Marriage Teach Us to Grow appeared first on BellaNaija - Showcasing Africa to the world. Read today!.
