Emily Parker spoke with author Dorothy Littel Greco about the ups and downs of married life, and how to build a strong relationship.

Dorothy Littel Greco

Emily: Your book is all about marriage so the first question I'm going to ask you is: how did you meet your husband?

Dorothy: Christopher and I met at Boston University in 1981. We were both students there in the same college. He was studying film and I was studying journalism. We also went to the same church and the same very tiny, fledgling university Christian fellowship group on BU's campus, so we had multiple points of overlap. There was no romantic interest for the first four to five years, we were just friends. Then things slowly took a turn and we started dating.

Emily: When was the moment that you knew you were going to marry him?

Dorothy: That's a long story! We had a dating relationship that was characterised by on again, off again. I was on and he was off. That lasted for two years and then we had a really terrific time together out in California. I was on a year long assignment for a magazine and he came out to visit me. We had a week that was much more like the times that we have together now. In that week he proposed and I said yes, so we had a giddy week together and then I went on my way to finish my assignment.

Five months later, the day after I got home, he broke up with me and said he never wanted to talk to me again. Then we had two full years of not talking to each other at all. There was no contact.

After that time, he had this sense one day at work that maybe he'd made a mistake, so he got hold of me and asked if I'd like to talk through what had happened. Although I was fearful and maybe a little sceptical, I said "sure, why not?" So we got together and from that first time it was clear that both of us had changed so profoundly that the relationship and conversation very quickly went from talking about what had happened to talking about when we were going to get married.

Emily: So, with your marriage itself, what are some of the greatest things that you've discovered?

Dorothy: I think it's the most wonderful and yet the most challenging relationship that exists on the face of the earth. It's incredible to be loved by someone over the long haul and to be able to love them back. Married sex is amazing, and I think I've been confronted again and again with just how profoundly I need Jesus. I need something outside of myself in order to love my husband really well on a consistent basis.

Emily: On the flip side of that, what have some of the hardest moments been and how have you overcome them?

Dorothy: I think that for both of us, we've had two really difficult time periods: year 10 and year 21. In year 10, we came to a place of reckoning where we realised we were both trying very hard to change each other and not trying so hard to change ourselves. So all of the disappointment, and the resentment that we had been trying to either disregard, or avoid, came bubbling to the surface in such a way that was completely unavoidable. It was a very painful and difficult year, but it was a year that we also learned how to do conflict well and to actually admit what our expectations for each other were.

Then in year 21 there was an unbelievable series of events that rearranged our life in three short months. His mum was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and she died within six weeks. We got bed bugs after we dropped our son off at college. That might seem minor, but if you've had bed bugs you know it's not minor. Our neighbour died in a tragic accident. We had to leave a church that we had helped to start and had been part of for 14 years.

The earlier crisis was internal, the second crisis was more external, which in some ways made it easier to deal with, because we were on the same team together. So there was a lot of praying, a lot of processing, a lot of asking for help and then a lot of waiting for God to break through.

In both of these circumstances we grew closer together and learned how to love each other better, which I think is a sign of God's redemptive purposes throughout these kinds of seasons.

Emily: How have you learnt what sacrificial love looks like?

Dorothy: I think ultimately, for both Christopher and me, Jesus is our North Star. We're always looking to him to understand what sacrificial love looks like.