Emily Verseveldt & Ricardo Aguilar

Wedding Date: May 13, 2017

Kids: Luca (3), Teo (1)

Top Tips for Building a Strong Marriage:

We enjoy creating small milestones, events, and routines that are often overlooked but are exciting and worthy of celebration. Our current stage of life is busy, leaving limited time for one-on-one connections.

We prioritize our children and their well-being, but intentionally focus on and highlight moments of celebration. To create excitement, we involve our children and make anticipation a key element. Their enthusiasm and ability to make anything exciting, no matter how small, is contagious and we leverage it to our advantage. Despite the demands of childcare, we make an effort to celebrate milestones such as our children's achievements, work accomplishments, immigration milestones, and even being interviewed for a podcast. We involve our children in the celebration, but continue it after they are asleep with fancy meals, random order in days, a glass of champagne at night, appetizer plates with late-night movies, and picnics in the living room.

Celebrating the little moments has become a crucial way for us to stay connected. While we still spend the majority of our time with our children, the focus, energy, and feeling of connection is different from our day-to-day routines.

Surprises or Challenges in Marriage:

What we have found challenging is that no matter how much you work through your old challenging patterns of relating, when loss and grief occur, the old pattern also resurfaces making it hard to connect to your spouse during the time that you actually need them the most. We have experienced multiple pregnancy losses which has particularly highlighted this dynamic for us. Each time it has happened, our old patterns surface driving disconnection. The positive part to knowing what these patterns are, is that we have also noticed how we can recognize them faster each time which leads to recognizing the others need and then being able to reach for each other through the grief instead of 'after'.

Listen to Ricky’s proposal song here.

Wedding song: Broken Together by Casting Crowns

Emily & Ricky are both marriage & family therapists with The Journey Through. Follow their work on Facebook.