Kids, you know that I am the queen of fun, active things to do. Connecting cool people with other cool people is basically like my spiritual gift. And to a friend in trauma that I couldn’t begin to understand, that’s all I could offer. I invited him to soccer games and game nights and everything else I could think of doing.
I didn’t expect to fall in love with him.
I didn’t expect to find in him the five things I’d set as my seemingly unreachable standard: smart, strong, kind, funny, and safe.
I didn’t expect to have to justify our kindness towards each other, over and over. I didn’t expect to find my job at a Christian organization, or his, to be on the line for not following the unspoken and unwritten rules.
I didn’t expect to have to transition from being a snarky single blogger to a boring married one.
But I did expect that life and love would be different than I thought (thanks, 1999 version of Caedmon’s Call), and that’s what I hope I can keep writing about.
I don’t want to tell you that marriage is perfect or completely fulfilling, because it’s not, even when it’s unbelievably happy. I still don’t think getting a Ring by Spring or saving sex til marriage or not dating someone who was married before will save the you that has to look in the mirror every morning. I don’t think that God’s best is to reconcile every broken marriage.
But I do still believe that the best gift we have is to say what we really think about our real lives, and say it aloud to friends who will listen and trust.
I am still terrified of the gravity of building a life-long partnership, moving to a new city in a new state, practicing vulnerability, making friends, saying no to good things like Seminary and yes to other good things like a Master’s in Clinical Psychology, writing and speaking, and whatever life holds for me.
So here we are, with no grand conclusions. We’ve made it another week, in a life that is not second-best.
This life is good and we are all together, trying at a holy sort of happiness.
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This article originally appeared at Emily is Speaking Up.
