What You Don't Know. . .

It won't kill you.

Unless, of course, we're talking about survival instincts like not licking poison ivy, which I'm not. I'm talking about all the things you don't know when you start out together as a husband and wife.

My best buddy, BreAnne, and I play at weddings from time to time, and last night we were booked to play for a ceremony and reception. I offer proof, see?



Yeah, I think it's pretty cool my bestie plays the harp. But I digress.

There at the end of the reception, the bride and groom walked over to cut the cake. Being in the far corner, we couldn't get a great view of the happenings, but we saw the expectant crowd keep looking expectant after some time and someone jokingly said, "Just cut the cake!"

It made me think back to my experience cutting the cake with my hubby. . . It was one of those things best described with a picture.



We were totally wingin' it. If you spare any thought of it at all beforehand, you think, "How hard can it be to cut into a cake?"

Well, it's not that hard. If the cake isn't round and covered with ribbon and flowers.



I remember walking over to the cake with that massive knife in hand, thinking all was well. But then I realized, "Wait a minute. This isn't as simple as they lead you to believe. Do we cut a triangle or a square? How do we remove the ribbon? Do we cut a big piece or a little piece? Do we cut from the bottom tier or the top one? Oh mylanta. Everyone is staring at us. What do we do? What do we do?"

I'm sure Chuck was thinking I was crazy and that it's not rocket science. I tremble to think how often that thought has crossed his mind in the last 3+ years. :)

But what I'm getting at with this long story of randomness is that you don't really know what you're doing when you first start out, whether you realize it when you're cutting your cake or when the honeymoon is over or when the first kid comes along. Maybe it's when you have your first disagreement, when he first lets a big ol' toot loose after you climb into bed, or maybe it's when you lose your husband's favorite pair of socks {I haven't done that, by the way, merely because he doesn't have a favorite pair. But I've lost just about everything else}.

What about when either of you suffer a family tragedy or something unexpected comes up at work?

None of us really knows what to do at first, and that's okay.

You learn together as husband and wife. You learn what each other likes and dislikes; how they like their steak cooked; how to compromise on the little things and work together on the big things. You also learn how they get the job done differently than you, but that it still gets done. You learn even more about the person you already thought you loved, and that love continues to grow if you let it and take the time to cultivate it.

For example, one thing I hadn't really fully comprehended about Chuck until we cut the cake is that he takes MASSIVE bites of food. Of course, I already knew he could down a foot-long Subway in the time it takes me to eat a 6-inch, but it never occurred to me that it was because he took humungous bites.



I, however, don't take very big bites. .  . like, at all. Unless it's on accident. So he got what he deemed a "normal" bite of cake on the fork and tried to feed it to me:





That was a big bite, ya'll. Now he knows that I can't dislocate my jaw to accommodate food {albeit yummy} and he adjusts his bites accordingly when it comes time to share. After all, what's yours is mine when it comes to good food, right? That's what I thought.


Another thing to keep in mind is that everyone cuts their cake differently. I mean that literally and figuratively, of course. Your cake probably came out looking a little bit better than ours did when all was said and done. . .




{That's a mighty fine hack job, though, if I do say so myself.}

But the real point is not how your cake looks when it's all finished, it's that you cut the darn thing together. Make sense?

If you don't know how to do something, learn.

If you don't think you can do something, try.

Lean on each other and learn from each other. You can't go wrong as long as you keep at it as a team! When you find yourself in a pickle, just think back to when you had no clue what you were doing, but you did your best anyway, and you did it together.

There's a reason you hold the knife together when cutting your wedding cake instead of just letting the more confident cake-cutter take charge.

:)