Feeling: enthralled
Listening to: Vienna Teng - Momentum
Reading/Watching: la. so.

Moving on... I decided not to write one ridiculously long blog on several different subjects, so it'll be cut into sections.

Sunday was the 29th, marking mine my husband's Semianniversary. (I know someday it will seem ridiculous that we celebrated being married for six months, especially since we signed on for sixty years and all, but for now, we like celebrating the little things. Hell, we just like celebrating.)

It's funny, how we both feel like it's been longer. Not that time has been dragging or something--more like we've been at this point of closeness and working as a team for so long that we can't seem to remember what life was like before we had each other. Although if I need to remember, I can go back and read old blogs... that's a bracing look down memory lane.

I realize that every couple feels like their love is the first, the foremost, the most amazing in the world. Or maybe that's just people with their first love. I can truthfully say that mon coeur is my first love, in every sense, because it wasn't actually love until it was us, so every discovery and every happy moment and every cute story feels like something so momentous that I want to run out and tell everyone on earth about the amazing and the wonderful. There are probably some people who wish I wouldn't, and are sick of hearing about it, hence why I tend to file it away in my own personal memory bank, instead. But if I ever do make it into a book or script of some kind, it will be the antithesis of most romantic comedies- instead of the flawed guy chasing after the perfect girl, it will be the flawed, frightened, ugly girl who wastes time in so many ways, before she stops running in circles and there is this someone with a superhero under his Normal Boy costume, a superhero with a magic mirror that shows what he sees in her, and suddenly she's not ugly at all. And it will have snappy dialogue and a kickass indie soundtrack, and no "The End."

For our semianniversary, the bookstore was nice enough to give me the night off, and we went out to dinner at Red Lobster (mon coeur had a lobster tail for the first time in his life, and the look of joy on his face was priceless), then to a movie (Marie Antoinette, good but the ending was unsatisfying), and came home to our favorite wine and decided to have a slice of our anniversary cake (the top tier of the wedding cake that is saved until, you guessed it, the first anniversary).

Now, I know we're supposed to wait for the first year mark, hence the whole "anni" part of the anniversary cake. But we'd heard about how many times, by the time a year has passed, the cake is dried out and gross from being frozen all year, so it's basically a symbol, of which the blissful couple takes two bites, then throws away. We thought this cake deserved better (lemon cake with raspberries between the layers and the creamiest lemon frosting on earth). So we decided to try it before it had a chance to get all desiccated and gross, and sliced it open early, deciding to still save a portion for the official date of April 29.

And for the record, the cake was still amazing. So we're hoping it will remain so until April.

It's been six months, and I find myself thinking about the week or so, about a month before the wedding, when I was freaking out about how things could go wrong. I was getting classic Cold Feet, but I was so afraid that it was a sign of Something Bigger that I barely mentioned it to anyone. But I was panicking, and all I wanted to do was make the crazy planning and last-minute details go away, and hide on an island somewhere. From that island, I would teleconference with every happily married (and also every unhappily divorced) couple in the country, and find out what they felt like when they first got married, what went right and what went wrong, and what I could do to ensure that I could keep him forever and not screw it up. But unfortunately, I had no teleconferencing equipment, so I decided the island idea might not be feasible.

Instead, I just thought long and hard about my two possibilities: don't get married, face the most painful time of my life as I tried to untangle my life from the man that I couldn't be with, and possibly escape the future pain of a divorce... or trust in God, trust in my husband, and embrace the happiness I had so easily in my grasp, just hoping for the best and knowing that if nothing else, I would have some happiness for a while. Even if it didn't work out someday, and I wound up broken, I would have some years of having this wonderful man, and this wonderful life that we were building together.

And, for lack of a crystal ball to promise that we would still love each other as much in sixty years, I went with the only choice that didn't make me feel like vomiting: I married the man I wanted to spend my life with, and just prayed that we could be one of those lucky couples who figured out how to make things work as problems came along, instead of like all the people we knew around us who didn't make it.

Six months in, I am so (so so so so etc.) happy that I didn't talk myself out of it. Whatever insane fears I had, they seem ridiculous now. What matters most is grabbing for happiness when it's there to be had, and then working to keep it as hard as you can, because being willing to work for it is part of what makes it work.

Big sweeping statements aside, we're past the rough part of year one. He transitioned out of one career and into another (surprisingly adjacent). I balanced being overworked and underpaid, trying to put up more savings for the time when he might be job hunting. We got tired and frustrated and snipped at each other over housework and money, but at the end of the day we still went to bed and talked over things, holding each other and getting through it, finding a balance and finding a common ground. He's still the person I most look forward to seeing at the end of my day. He still fits, so completely and so safely, an 'us' that makes sense and makes us better when we're together.

People who have been married five, ten, twenty years, are laughing at me right now. My brother and his wife are approaching their fifth anniversary, and I can't imagine how silly I must sound to them, when they have been married ten times as long as we. Even so, I hope they felt the same way once, because that means we're doing something right.

Comments? 0 so far...
Not a Diaryland member? Sign the Guestbook.