Before and After: Our Austin...

I’ve Been Married For A Year….Here’s What It Feels Like

In this blog post, I’m doing my best to really say what a year of marriage feels like to me, instead of whatever it is that I think I’m “supposed” to say about a year of marriage. I keep finding myself writing what I think I might what to see when I’m looking back after twenty years of marriage (you know, I’ll want to look back and read all the cutesy “butterflies and roses” type stuff, which is definitely there (I might even say the majority of the first year was that stuff….haha!), but there’s also other real stuff). I wrote a quick draft of this, but I’m forcing myself not to go back and edit (except for typos) before publishing this thing:

1 YEAR OF MARRIAGE

We celebrated our 1 year anniversary on Sunday. How do 365 days pass by before I can blink? Our wedding day is still one of my funnest days of life. (Read the recap here.) I seriously can’t believe we got to have such a fun, truly perfect, stress-free day. What the what? I’ve heard my fair share of stressful wedding day stories, and I thought that something would surely happen on mine to make it less than ideal. But nothing like that happened….it was just pure, fun, and easy. I loved the entire day.

I don’t know how to put feelings into words (I don’t feel like I’m a great writer in that way.) But I want to have this blog post as a sort of record about year one (and maybe I’ll write one of these posts every year), so this is my best attempt to capture a year’s worth of feelings about marriage:

I didn’t know I could love someone this much. I’ve loved my parents, and I’ve loved my sisters, and I’ve loved my best friends. But I’ve never loved another human being this much, where I actually feel like my life is his life, and his life is mine.

We’ve officially crossed the “gross things we do in front of each other” line…. And we can laugh about it. And we’re still really into each other. I’d say that’s a healthy line to cross in the first year of marriage….

I can’t believe he picked me. We’re one year in, and the more I get to know him, the more I’m impressed with him and his character and spirit. I married a gem! Sometimes I think about him, and I think about me, and I wonder, why did he choose me? I’m so lucky!

We still have so much to learn about each other. Ha! Ok, this is probably a thing that someone at 20 years of marriage will read and say, “well….duh!” 😉 We’ve been on hundreds of dates together and talked for probably thousands of hours, yet I still feel like there’s so much we’re learning about each other. To make things more complicated, we’re both constantly changing and learning new things about ourselves, so completely understanding my partner sometimes feels like a moving target. But I’m still having fun trying to figure him out.

Nothing really awful has happened to us yet, so I’m not sure how we’ll handle a crisis together. This is a bit of a confession. I just don’t know how we’ll work together when something truly catastrophic blows up in our lives. We’ve experienced some pain, like the death of grandparents, and the stress of buying a house/losing jobs/cars breaking down/home remodels, and we’re raising a kitten together, which is funny, but we haven’t lost any parents or raised a kid or gone through life-threatening sicknesses. I feel like we’re pretty calm and cool together as a couple, but I also feel like that might be because we haven’t gone through anything truly horrible together. I also know how very real pain can be in life, so I know it will happen at some point to us. I’m just saying that it hasn’t happened in the first year of marriage.

I wake up thankful every morning. I can’t believe this is my life.

He’s so safe. I can tell him all of my craziest thoughts and emotions. I can trust him with anything. That’s a crazy huge blessing that I get to experience.

I’ve learned that it doesn’t discount love to explain exactly how and why I need to be loved. This has been the biggest lesson for me (that I feel I can publicly share on a blog.) Nate can’t read my mind, and I can’t read his. If I’m not feeling loved in the way that I need it, I’m allowed to tell him how I need to experience love (for instance, I usually need to experience love through words of affirmation…that’ s my main love language.) And just because I tell him what I need and he does it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a real love that he’s offering me. It just means we’re still getting to know each other.