Anniversary

I started this blog entry on Sunday morning, May 13th.  However, life tends to get in the way of completing tasks in my house.  Namely a sweet 7 month old who demands a lot of my attention now that she is mobile and getting into EVERYTHING.  So pretend you're reading this on Sunday. =)


Today is mine and my husband's first anniversary!!  My parents came and picked up the baby at about 4pm yesterday and we were on our own for over 15 hours!  It has been so truly wonderful and refreshing.  We got to play married with no kids and I enjoyed every last second of it.  I love that we have such a great relationship and that we have so much fun together.  I have known since the first time I met him that he was a great man.  I also knew that he was someone I wanted to get to know, to be close to, to be friends with, and to love.  Lucky for me, he wanted to love me too.   The more I got to know him the more I knew that I would never want to know anyone else.

I have never had a solid opinion on the subject of soul mates.  I still have no idea whether or not I believe in them.  What I do know, is that my husband is perfect for me.  We had a long talk in the car on our way to our date night.  Well, I did most of the talking and he did most of the listening.  However, what I believe is that one of the main reasons we get along so well boils down to something so simple - the truth.  Never, even since day one of our relationship have we ever pretended to be who we are not.  He has been himself, and I have been myself.  We're not the couple that is supposed to survive.  We have the odds stacked against us.  My husband is divorced and has a 9-almost-10 year old daughter.  We started dating in September 2010 after we met where we worked together at a local sports bar.  6 months after we started dating, we found out that we were (2 months) pregnant.  3 months after that we got married.  In October 2011, our sweet baby girl was born.  This is not your typical set up for a happily ever after story.  Most of the other stories I know that start this way, don't end well.  Most don't even start well.  We are going to make it though.  Not because I think we will, because I know we will.  This was the main thought that resonated in me last night.  We are going to make it.  There is not a thing in this world that I wouldn't do for him.  There is nothing I wouldn't do to save this marriage.



So then I wonder, where does everyone else go wrong?  I can't be the only newlywed that feels this way.  I know that I'm not.  Do half of the people who get married NOT feel this way (since the divorce rate is 50%)?  Or does something change? What changes?  I have already watched my fair share of people get divorced.  It's tragic.  Other than infidelity, the most common thing I hear is that the people in the marriage just aren't happy anymore.  So how do you go from happy to unhappy?  Do a lot of people lie to themselves and pretend that they're happier than they really are?  Do one day they wake up and decide they're tired of pretending? Is unhappiness a good enough reason for divorce? Or does the pretending go even further?  These days, dating is such a game.  While some of the masks that we may put on are innocent enough, I think that in some ways we damage our marriages before they even start.  While, as a girl pretending that you love watching ESPN every single day and watching a sporting event on TV 3 out of the 5 weeknights is totally normal for you, probably won't someday wreck your marriage - what other masks are we putting on to make ourselves more appealing to the guys we date?  When the relationship starts to get more serious, do we start to be honest about what's really behind the mask?  Or do we hang on to our mask in fear and then take it off after we're married and now our spouses are stuck with us?  How much are we pretending to be someone who we aren't -- both guys and girls and when the masks (and gloves) come off a few months or even a year after the engagement, wedding, and newlywed high wears off do we like who we see next to us in bed?  Or even worse, do we like who we see in the mirror?



I don't have any of the answers.  Do I think that people deserve to be happy?  Yes.  I have said it many times to people close to me.  "You deserve to be happy."  All the time though? Is that a reasonable expectation?  Here's what I do know.  I have been married for a year.  So I guess really I have no right or enough marriage experience to speculate about marriage yet.  I'll let you know how I feel again after 7 years.  Anyways, as I said, married for a year. It has been one of the happiest years of my life.  However, it's been exciting.  We had a small wedding, I got to plan it (with tons of help from my best friend), I picked out dresses, picked out a registry, bought tons of stuff, and spent lots of money.  There was a total "high" involved in the experience.  After the wedding was over, it was time to start planning for the baby.  A week after we got married, we got to find out what we were having and we started painting the room, getting the house ready, reading books, and picking out a registry (again).  Then in October our sweet girl arrived and it was one of the most amazing and fulfilling experiences of my life.  Being a mother is something I have always wanted.  It was exciting and overwhelming.  The point is, most of the first year of our marriage was exciting.  There were new experiences and new emotions that kept us on a "high".  By comparison, the past 6 years before I got married were not so happy.  My single and dating life had highs and lows.  Overall, I can say that I was happy about 40 - 50% of the time.  About half.  Now, I've had a lot of tragedy and bad experiences in my life to help the happiness be that low.  A lot of people would say they were happy about 60-75% of the time - maybe more.  However, if you are really honest with yourself, were you that happy?  Or were you just pretending?  I'm a realist.  Happiness has never been a big part of my adult life.  Would I like to believe that I deserve to be happy? Absolutely.  Do I think I've done anything to deserve all the heartache I've had? Nope.


So realistically speaking, if I have only been happy 40-50% of my unmarried life, why would I expect to be 100% or even 80 or 90% happy in my married life?  Why do I expect marriage to change how happy I am or am not?  I remember after my husband and I found out that we were pregnant, we were both afraid.  We knew that this wasn't exactly the way we planned to start things out.  We honestly shared with each other how we felt, what our fears were, and overall that ultimately we really loved each other and were committed to making a marriage and family work.  I remember that my husband asked me, I'm just worried because I don't know what your expectations of marriage are.  Here's what I told him.  I don't have any expectations about marriage, per se.  I expect that we will have really great and wonderful times together.  I also expect that we will have tragic, hard, and horribly sad times.  Most of all, I expect that this life and a marriage will be nothing like what we expected.  Now as vague and convoluted as that sounds, I think it has some truth to it.  How can we have crazy expectations about our marriages when we aren't even guaranteed to have our expectations about life met?  To me, marriage has never been about finding happiness. 

This life we live has burdens.  We all have them.  Physical burdens, financial burdens, and emotional burdens to name a few. I believe God created marriage so that we don't have to bear those burdens alone.  We don't have to shoulder the load all by ourselves.  We have a helper, a partner, and a friend to help us carry it.  And we have love to help make it a bit sweeter.  So that even in the midst of our sadness, anger, financial hardship, loss, or any other tragedy that could come our way we have someone who is right next to us, walking beside us, experiencing it with us.  Why would we ever turn to anyone or anything else for comfort?  My husband and I often say that no matter what, we always want to "turn towards each other."  If I'm going through a rough time emotionally.  If the finances are scary and all he can think about is how we're going to pay the bills.  If death, or sickness plagues our lives or our family.  We are committed and always want to turn towards each other and turn towards the Lord.  We believe that is the only way to keep our marriage strong.  The minute we seek someone, anyone outside our marriage for comfort and for help when we're struggling is when we start to slowly walk away from each other. I never want to take one single step away from the wonderful man that God has given me.