Marriage

I remember when TJ and I met.

Things were so exciting.  He would come up to Milwaukee and visit me in college.  He would make me dinner.  We would walk around campus.  He was in school at the time as well, so we would study together.  And I remember that he had this long black coat.  He thought he looked really cool in it.  I liked that it smelled like him.  He let me keep it and wear it around campus when he wasn’t there.  I looked like an idiot in a coat ten times too big for me, but I didn’t care.  It reminded me of him.

A year or so later, he decided to go to nursing school at a campus about an hour out of Chicago where I was living at the time.  I went with him one day to check out the campus, and I realized how much I missed academia.  I applied to grad school there, and a few months later, we both moved into our own apartments at NIU.

He proposed to me on that campus and two years later, we were married.  Our life when we first got married was crazy.  I was teaching and waiting tables and going to school full time.  He, too, was a full time student and he worked multiple jobs.  On top of that, our campus was over half an hour from where we decided to rent our first apartment.  Sometimes I would wake up in the mornings and realize just how much I had in front of me that day.  But I would remember that at the end of it we would both hop in our car, head to our new apartment, and I would fall asleep next to him.  That gave me the strength to push through.

And then one day, the pregnancy test turned positive.  Our little duo was to become a trio and then a quartet and then a quintet.  Now our lives feel possibly more full than ever before.  We don’t have a moment to ourselves until about 10pm and then we are both too exhausted to move.

We very rarely get time to have long conversations.  We never get moments to ourselves.  And sometimes it gets hard to see the couple in the midst of the family.

It’s easy to see each other as parents.  He’s my other half.  When I need to tag out, he’s the one to tag in.  When he needs a break, I need to pick up the slack.  And when I need a break, he’s the only one who can take over.  I’m not sure we ever really had romantic dinners, but if we did, they have been replaced by chaotic battles where food is very rarely the only thing thrown.

We rely on each other.  And sometimes that can cloud our perceptions of each other.  It gets hard to see each other when we so desperately need to see our relief.

And that’s hard.  When we start seeing each other as co-parents, it can get lonely.  We want to be seen as more than mom and dad, and yet we can sometimes only see that in the other.

We each want to be visible.  We each want to be validated and appreciated.  We both want to be heard amidst the overwhelming noise that surrounds us.

But we try really hard.

We don’t always want to try hard.  Usually we want to retreat into our own private peace.  But we do.  Because we have decided that we are worth it.

And this might all sound weird, me reliving moments in our mutual past.  But all of this is a badge of honor of sorts that I wear proudly.

That man and I… we are living in this world.  We are living in this broken, chaotic, messy world.  And we have held hands, and we aren’t letting go.

It seems like every news station and newspaper and website these days is talking about marriage.  Trying to define it or redefine it or understand it or dismiss it.  Marriage is painted as the ultimate destination of love.  It’s a feeling.  It’s a requisite for happiness.  It’s a right.

But in trying to determine the logistics of who can and can’t get married, when trying to determine in what capacity its sanctity lies, what we don’t talk about is what marriage really is.  And this is scary to me because there is a whole generation of children who are growing up watching these battles and are erroneously learning that marriage is the destination and not the starting line.

Because here’s the thing.  Marriage isn’t supposed to be easy.  It’s not about getting your needs met.  It’s not about fulfilling your dreams or reaching your goals.  It’s not about romance and it’s not about Valentine’s Day, and it’s not about the big vacations.

Those are all some benefits of marriage, but it’s not what it’s really about.

What it’s about is so very much more.

Marriage is about sacrificing yourself to meet the needs of another.  It’s about prioritizing someone else’s goals on par with or ahead of your own.  It’s about searching deep within yourself to bypass those selfish wants in favor of the betterment of another.

It’s about waking up every single day and deciding yes and choosing to act out love.  It’s about realizing that love is a feeling, but it’s also an act.  And that the greatest way to keep the feeling alive is to keep acting that love.  It’s about learning that as soon as we start focusing exclusively on our wants and needs, we find we start loving ourselves more than those around us.

And it’s about failing at all of that more often than you care to admit but standing back up and starting again.

It’s about choosing to create something together.  Something that is so much greater and so much more glorious than any romantic sentiment can be because it’s something real that has been tested by the fire.

It’s about facing the challenges and committing yourself and coming out the other side realizing that you are both stronger for it and realizing that there is no one you could trust more than the person who rode the storm with you.

This might sound weird, but to me, it’s the challenges that make marriage what it is.  Anyone will stand by us through the good times.  Anyone will like us when we are at our best.  But we are about more than the good times and our best.

What I think, unfortunately, a lot of this social talk about marriage does is make it seem like love is about roses and hearts and diamond rings and sentiments.

No.  Love is much harder than that.  And it’s much, much better than that.

Love brings us to marriage, and marriage puts us through the fire.  And through that fire, we become pure and real and holy, and our love becomes worth more than any of the diamonds this world can hold.

Sadly, it seems as if too many people these days believe that marriage can be thrown away.  They believe there is something wrong when it gets hard.  They believe happiness can be found in walking away and starting again.

But just like anything else in life, easy paths lead to shallow victories.

Marriage is worth it, people.  Love is worth it.  Commitment is worth it.  Integrity is worth it.  And forever is absolutely fucking worth it.

Marriage isn’t a feeling.  It’s a commitment, and it’s a covenant, and it’s holy, and it’s worth every single ounce of our being.

If only we let it.