I’ve been married for 7 years…and this is the first year I’m publishing this blog post a month + 3 days late. So maybe that says more about 7 years of marriage than anything?
7 years of marriage is long enough to know how completely dumb this blog post series is. As if any two marriages will experience the same high and lows and roller coaster along the same tracks.
But…I’ve already started this little series, and I’m not going to quit now that I’m 7 years in. So here you go.
I spent our anniversary potty-training our youngest. So my memories of the day involve the drip-drops of 2-yr-old’s urine all over the house and me with an all-purpose spray bottle following him and saying, “you peed on the floor! Pee doesn’t go on the floor, pee goes in the toilet. Next time you feel like you need to go, run to the toilet.” So if that doesn’t scream romance, I don’t know what does…
7 (SEVEN!!) years. Nate and I actually had an incredibly romantic, quite literally the best and most perfect anniversary celebration a few weeks before our anniversary. At this point in our marriage and parenting journey, we have to schedule these things whenever we can, and that happened to be during spring break when my dear sister volunteered to stay with the kids so Nate and I could get away for 2 nights. We picked the sparkling Hotel Emma at The Pearl in San Antonio, which was an experience I want to repeat again and again.
And since our 7 year anniversary was on a random Monday in late March, and we’re both perpetually exhausted, we were like, “um, can we count that hotel stay as our anni celebration …we don’t need to do anything special on the actual day, right? Right.”
Phew.
Like I said, I’ve been married long enough now to realize how absurd it is that I even write these annual posts. Any thought of “this is what marriage feels like at this point in the journey” is completely bogus, because I know now that no two marriages follow the same path.
I do enjoy writing these, though, so that I can look back. It’s cute to see what I was thinking at 2 years in. I think I’ll look back someday and think that 7 years was “cute” too, even though I feel like 7 is soooo long.
Here’s another thing about 7 years: in a strange way, I’m understanding that I’m just starting to get to know my partner. We’ve been in a relationship for more than a decade now, and 7 of those years we’ve been legally committed to one another.
But there was a lot I took for granted early on. I appreciate his tenacity, his willingness to learn, and his ability to never ever ever yell or make painful remarks to me or about me (how does he do that??) so much more now that we’ve been in it for a while. I say this from my heart: I wish I could be more like him in that regard. Nate Kennedy is one of the most patient humans I’ve ever met, and it’s so easy to be married to him.
Sometimes I feel a bit of sadness at this point in our lives. And it’s hard now to know if I’m talking about parenting or marriage, because they’re so intertwined. But I remember how we used to be so much fun. We were fun, y’all! We would go to shows in downtown Austin and stay up late and sleep in on the weekends and go our for boozy brunches. We used to travel to Europe at the spur-of-the-moment when we found cheap tickets and the only people we had to tell were our jobs.
So sometimes I look at 7 years of marriage and I’m like, “oh…yeah. We used to be way more fun than we are now.” I notice this the most when I’m hanging out with people who don’t have children, and they’re willing to leave the house at 7:30 pm to go to dinner and get cocktails, and I’m like, “uuuuh 7:30 is 100% when I prefer to get in my PJs now and watch a show on the couch so I can crash at 9 pm.” And that’s what our marriage looks like at this point, which is so very un-exciting.
Except…
I actually think it is exciting. No, that’s the wrong word. It’s not that it’s exciting, it’s just that it’s right, and sturdy, and so very very comforting to know I’m evolving and growing with this person who has been at each stage with me for the past 7 years. That we were the newlyweds who would stay up all night doing things I won’t mention on this blog because no one needs to read that, and then we were more established in our marriage and felt like BFFs, and then we were new parents facing sleepless nights together and honestly just so confused over WHY IS THIS TINY CREATURE RUNNING THE SHOW? And then we were in the thick of parenting together and slowly realizing that this is the new normal. I like this.
And that’s the best I can explain 7 years of marriage. We’re here, we’re in the thick of it, and we really love each other. We’re simultaneously dreaming of years when we’ll be able to more easily get away and enjoy doing things together that we love (restaurants! travel! beer!) while also trying to dig our heels into the ground and never leave these wonderful years with our two tiny boys.
