030 17 Years of Marriage
Seventeen Years In, We're Still Learning How to Be Married
Something has been happening in the fifteen to twenty-five year range that Ashley and I have been watching up close.
Marriages that looked solid — couples we know, couples we love — coming apart. Not in dramatic fashion necessarily. Just quietly, slowly, the way anything drifts when nobody's steering. One morning someone wakes up and realizes they don't know the person next to them anymore, and somewhere along the way they stopped noticing it was happening.
This episode wasn't meant to be advice. It was meant to be a look back — seventeen years, the memories that stuck, the habits that held, the hard seasons that shaped us. But I think what we found in that exercise is that the advice is in the looking back. You can see the patterns from here that you couldn't see while you were living them.
So here's what we found.
It Started in a Parking Lot
We went to a college that wasn't coed.
What that meant practically is that the only time Ashley and I could spend together was in the car. So we'd hop in — I'm a car person anyway — and just drive a big loop around the city. No destination. No agenda. Just circles.
What we didn't realize at the time was that we were building something. A habit of talking. Of being present in a space with limited distractions, no service half the time, nothing to do but be with each other. Some of the deepest conversations we've ever had have happened in a car. We still do it. We still take drives where we pull out conversation starter cards — yes, actual cards — and ask each other questions that keep surprising us even after all this time.
That college parking lot habit has carried through seventeen years because it was never about the car. It was about the protected time. The disarmed space. A therapist told me once that car conversations are easier for difficult things too — you're not face to face, the tension drops, the guard comes down. We figured that out early without knowing why it worked.
Find your version of the car ride. The walk. The drive. The ritual that creates space for the conversation that needs to happen. It's not fancy. That's exactly why it works.
Do Hard Things Together, On Purpose
In 2014 a friend dared us into a Tough Mudder.
Our initial answer was no. Then Josh said he'd do it if a certain friend would. That friend said yes. Suddenly we were training for an obstacle race nobody asked for.
What I remember most isn't the race itself. It's the photo Ashley found when we were going back through old memories — her carrying me on her back, piggyback, trying to run. There's a partner carry portion that requires the women to haul the men a certain distance. She did it. Grimly, probably. But she did it.
That experience planted something. Doing hard things together, on purpose, builds something that comfortable things don't. There's a team that gets forged in the strain that can't be built any other way. It's why we've continued to choose physically demanding travel — national parks, ten miles a day in foreign cities, the trip that left us wrecked but glad. Comfortable trips are fine. The ones that push you are the ones you remember.
Build shared hard things into your life intentionally. It doesn't have to be an obstacle race. It just has to be something that requires both of you.
The Habits That Became Glue
Looking back across seventeen years, the things that held us together weren't the anniversaries or the grand gestures. They were the small recurring choices that compounded over time.
Going to sleep at the same time sounds like nothing. Early in our marriage I stayed up gaming — that was my window to play without it cutting into time together. It still took something away. When I eventually gave it up, we got something back that I hadn't realized we'd lost. The winding down together. The margin at the end of the day that belongs to each other. Ashley found her solution — she reads her Kindle in bed while I've got my eye mask on — and somehow we land in the same place at the same time. That matters more than it sounds.
The gym. The food. The gratitude practice. The devotionals. These aren't big things. They're the daily habits that function like glue — you don't notice them holding until you look back and realize what would have drifted without them.
Ashley's food journey alone has spanned the whole marriage. She's tried approximately twenty-seven variations of eating well — her count, not mine — and keeps landing back on whole foods, least processed as possible, as few ingredients as she can't pronounce as possible. That didn't happen overnight. It happened across a decade of slow pivots, eliminated things, better swaps. That's what sustainable change actually looks like.
If you can find one shared habit — not many, just one — that you do together regularly, start there. The interests that both of you love become the thread that keeps you from drifting. I've heard too many couples say he does his thing and I do mine in a tone that quietly reveals the distance those separate things have created.
I Was the One Driving
In 2020, Ashley dislocated her elbow in a UTV accident.
I was the one driving.
Anyone who's ever been in an accident where someone they love got hurt knows that particular weight. The guilt isn't rational and it doesn't care. This person I care about most is now injured. She can't do anything she normally does. And I did that.
We both had our own wrestling to do. Ashley had to figure out how to live in a body that suddenly couldn't do the things it used to — asking for help with everything, including things you never think to think about. I had to work through what I'd done without letting that spiral turn inward and go somewhere dark.
What neither of us expected was what came out the other side. Ashley said it best: that season taught us to communicate in ways we hadn't needed to before. She had to articulate how she did things so I could do them for her. I had to show up in ways that were new to me. And the vows — in sickness and in health — became something we lived rather than something we'd recited.
She said she wouldn't do it again. But she's grateful for who we became in it.
The hard seasons aren't interruptions to the marriage. They're the forge. The lessons you learn and the person you become are not built in the easy — they are only built in the hard and the valley. We know that now in a way that seventeen years of smooth road couldn't have taught us.
Grief Comes in Waves and Hits Differently
The last ninety days before we recorded this episode were heavy.
We lost Josh's mom two years ago, after she'd lived with us for nearly a decade. We've lost close friends — relationships measured in decades, not years. And Ashley named something in this episode that I think is more important than it sounds: we grieve differently.
She processes outwardly. I go quiet. Neither is wrong. But if you don't know that about each other — if you assume your partner's different response to loss means they don't care, or they're not affected, or something is broken — you will create distance exactly when you need closeness most.
If you haven't listened to Episode 18 on grief, that's worth a full listen alongside this one. The waves description is accurate. Grief doesn't follow a schedule. It arrives inconveniently, at odd times, without warning. What helps is knowing you're both in it together, even when you're in it differently.
And Ashley said something I want to leave here plainly: know when to ask for help outside the marriage. Your partner cannot be your only resource in every season. Friends, family, a counselor — knowing when to reach and then actually reaching is a skill. We're all bad at it. Get better at it.
The Upstream Paddle
Everything drifts.
That's not a pessimistic statement. It's just physics applied to relationships. If you do nothing, you float downstream — toward disconnection, toward distance, toward two people sharing a house and a calendar and not much else. The current is always moving.
The intentional paddle upstream is the whole game. It doesn't have to be heroic. Car rides. A shared gym habit. The hard trip you planned on purpose. Going to bed at the same time. Asking for help when the grief is too heavy to carry alone. Small things, done consistently, over time.
As Ashley put it: you can't have one person dragging the boat upstream. It won't work. Both of you have to paddle, and you'll take turns leading depending on the season. That's not a burden — that's the deal. And every older couple with a marriage worth looking up to will tell you the same thing: it's hard, and it is absolutely worth it.
Seventeen years in. Here's to seventeen more.
Growth happens when you take action. Daily anything changes everything.
Resources
Related Episodes
Episode 10 — Intentional Marriage ft. Ashley Negron — Where the marriage conversation started on this show. The foundation this episode builds on. → Watch on YouTube
Episode 18 — How to Navigate Grief & Loss — Directly relevant to the grief section of this episode. → Watch on YouTube
Episode 26 — Marriage Q&A ft. Ashley Negron — The questions listeners asked about our marriage, answered. → Watch on YouTube
Episode 34 — Optimizing Your Travel ft. Ashley Negron — The travel habits mentioned here get their own full episode. → Watch on YouTube
Products We Use
📖 Kindle — Ashley's solution to going to bed at the same time without the same sleep schedule (affiliate link)
Listen to the Full Episode
This post is drawn from Episode 30 of the Optimizing Beyond Podcast: 17 Years, A Look Back ft. Ashley Negron.
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Daily anything changes everything.