Marriage

Image Source: Jeff Holt via FlickR

This is the first of many articles I will write about marriage and relationships, so I wanted to share my story about how I came to be married at 22 years old and what it has brought me so far.

Love at First Keg

I basically met my husband at a frat party.  Technically we met 6 months before through a service organization we were both members of, but we didn’t become friends until our junior year when my sorority and his fraternity were on the same homecoming team.  I had a boyfriend of 2.5 years that had been falling out of the picture for about a year at that point, so it wasn’t long before my future husband and I started dating.

We fell in love almost instantly.  People thought we were crazy, especially when he proposed to me at the beginning of our senior year 10 months after we started dating.

Seven months later, we graduated from college and moved 4 hours away from all our friends and family to a town in northern IL, where we spent our first year as an adult couple.

The Worst Year of Our Lives… (Fingers Crossed)

If I had to describe my own personal hell, it would be that year right after college.  I was at my first real job and my fiance/husband had taken a year off before grad school and worked as an optometry assistant, then a waiter/bartender.  We were on our own for the first time, planning a wedding in a different state, trying to get into grad schools, and had literally zero friends and not much more in our bank account.  It almost ripped us apart.  At the end of our first year of trying to build a life together, all we had to show was a clean, sterile, white-walled apartment and wedding money equivalent to the down payment on a house.

So we moved again.  Not just to another apartment or another town, but to another life – and it worked.  I changed jobs, we bought a condo in Chicago, started our grad school programs, and ran the Chicago marathon together.  Within four months, we were back to our college days where we had lots of friends from different social circles.  We became students again, went out again, and quickly adjusted to the rapid pace of city life.  Our condo is incredibly messy, but we are happy.

I thought I should retitle this article “My Life Post-Undergrad,” but then nobody would want to read it.

Instead, I’ll answer the question.  How do you make young love work?  You survive.  You do what’s necessary and make it through the downs so you can enjoy the ups.  You learn how to transition to a different life and still remember why you loved the person at the beginning.  You spend lots of time doing the wrong things and screwing everything up until you accidentally do something right.  You just make it work, because you have to.  You’re married.

If you aren’t ready for that, don’t get married.  Marriage is hard and being young only makes it harder.  I don’t regret getting married because I’m very happy; I know, however, we will struggle again and change lives again and it will be a challenge to keep our marriage grounded in its roots – Love.