LOVE!!! (Happy Anniversary to US!)

Today, a dear friend of mine, Lacresha Hayes , posted a blog entitled Falling Back in Love . She asked that we comment about our experience in love, and how we met our spouses. This was my response… Since our 8th wedding anniversary is tomorrow , I wanted to post it here on my blog and add a little… :)

1ST COMMENT:

Love is defined differently by each individual couple. My husband and I met in high school and it definitely wasn’t love at first sight LOL He was trying to ‘hook me up’ with his friend and I was trying to ‘hook him up’ with my friend – we were friends for nearly 4 months after school started, then went on our first date in November and have been together – off and on – ever since then. It’s been quite an adventure (and not the most positive kind) but we’ve grown together, learned from the plethora of mistakes we made, bonded through our troubles, and strengthened our love through the tests . Everyone is unique in love… Some people may say we were crazy for staying together through all the drama and craziness; I say I would have been crazy to have left him because I would never know him for the man he has become… and I would never BE the woman that I am. Love’s a strange thing… but something definitely worth fighting for when it’s REAL. :) God bless you, sweetie – I really enjoy your posts!!

2ND COMMENT:

To add to my previous comment, we’ve been together for nearly 12 years now… Sunday is our 8th wedding anniversary. We’ve experienced SO much together – negative and positive – but I can honestly say that I wouldn’t change it for the world. I couldn’t imagine loving him any differently… and since ALL of our experiences have shaped the way our love has become, I know that despite the pain and hard times, our love evolved perfectly and went through what it had to in order for us to survive the world – and know how much we mean to one another!

Obviously, I love my husband very much. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that we are WHO we are today. So much has changed since we met nearly 12 years ago. Looking back, we didn’t even realize we were just kids. We had the most confused, troubled, and what seemed like DOOMED start to our relationship, it’s amazing we made it out of the first 4-5 years TOGETHER. I was not quite 15 when we began dating. My husband was 3 days from his 16th birthday. We were married 3 1/2 years later and had 1 1/2 kids already. The first couple of years were disastrous. Murphy’s Law had NOTHING on our marriage LOL Things that most people didn’t think could POSSIBLY go wrong, went wrong… and that which COULD go wrong, definitely did. It was SO not funny at the time – and honestly I would never have imagined looking back and laughing at any of it. It was pretty painful… but now, I actually do. None of that is chronicled here, by the way, because all the earlier entries were typed up from my mommy journal which I was NOT going to include anything negative in because I intended to give a copy of it to the kids one day.

I look back and realize how young we were… how much we thought we knew, but didn’t… how "grown up" we were trying to be, but neither of us had matured enough to even know who we were as individuals, let alone matured enough to be able to accept or understand one another OR have any clue how to merge our separate personalities into becoming "husband" and "wife" … we were selfish, childish, and had no clue what marriage was about. All we knew was 1) we loved each other, 2) we had kids, so obviously we should be married, right? haha <— That’s still funny. Over the course of the first couple of years, I *believe* we almost divorced three times – and that doesn’t count the fact that we nearly got our  marriage anulled after the first few WEEKS. A mess? That’s totally an understatement. A trainwreck would be ALMOST accurate :) It’s almost mind-boggling to try to understand how two people that loved each other as much as we did could totally disregard one another the way we did… could totally make a mess of something we had planned to be sooooo ‘perfect’ <— that’s still funny, too. LOL

The truth? We were just KIDS. Both of us came from single-parent female-led households and had never really seen the way a "family" is supposed to function. I knew how my grandparent’s marriage was – and that is what I wanted… but I didn’t have a CLUE as to what it took to build it. What’s strange now is that I know it took FOR.E.VER to get things ‘together’ – but now that we have gotten to a point of normalcy in our marriage, it’s as if it’s always been this way. Hard to explain. All the bad just kinda went away… the memories are still there but instead of being a painful reflection of a good-love-gone-bad, it’s actually humorous to realize how STUPID we were and how many very simple mistakes led up to catatrophic ones. Anyway… I definitely didn’t start this post just to say how horrible we started out LOL But in explaining how bad it WAS, it’s easier for me to emphasize how AWESOME our life together is now.

Oh we still argue LOL We argue over who does more around the house, who should go break up the kids’ bickering match ‘this time’ , who is going to go grocery shopping, and who forgot to set the alarm clock or charge the cell phones last night. We argue about who BETTER watch their tone of voice or how MORE THAN ONE person is capable of throwing clothes in the washing machine. We still have our days where it’s like, "Um, do you have someone you haven’t gone to VISIT in a while. Why don’t you see about doing that TODAY!?" haha But that is how I like it. We’re honest with each other about our feelings. We don’t have to sugar coat things. If I’m slacking, he will let me know I need to get myself in gear. If he’s being inconsiderate, I’m quick to let him know he needs to check his tone. What it boils down to that we have NOW that we did not have before was 1) respect for ourselves, one another, and our marriage; 2) BALANCE in our expectations of one another. Funny thing, we had both of those elements about two years before we actually achieved a state of mutual happiness.

It wasn’t until we invited GOD to come into the mix that it all began to blend together perfectly. Before Him, the parts of our marriage came together about as smoothly as oil and water. No matter how hard we tried to come together, a very basic element kept us apart. Now that we have God in our lives, we’re still the same oil and water, but now there’s this unexplainable entity that bonds us together as one, even as we maintain our separate identities and respect the differences between us. If I haven’t mentioned it in a while, I SO FREAKING LOVE THIS MAN. I think I’ve said that before here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , and here , just to name a few :) I would never want to imagine my life without him… God knew what He was doing all along. Anyway, HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, baby. For those who haven’t heard it, check out the song I wrote for him – it’s called The Truth . And yes ALL vocals are me. And YES it’s under copyright so don’t try to boost my stuff LMBO

Have a great weekend.

Until next time...



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