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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.
Monica O'Brien is the Director of Digital at Fizz and author of the book Social Pollination, which helps businesses leverage social media for crazy growth!
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I also got married at 22 right after I graduated from college, so we’re in similar boats. One of my sticking points, however, was that I was able to financially support myself.
We’ve been married for more than 2 years now, and it’s been great. We’re growing together and enjoying all of it.
Jason,
That’s great. Thanks for sharing. Having your finances together is important in a marriage. Sounds like things are going well for you!
Im still in school and my boyfriend of 9 months has proposed to me. People laugh but i don’t doubt that it will happen. Thanks for sharing your story, it helps to know that its possible for love to last forever, no matter what.
“You survive. You do what’s necessary and make it through the downs so you can enjoy the ups.”
I think this piece of advice works toward anything you want to accomplish. Then, you make sure you keep surviving, because you only lose when you're out of time and you haven't achieved said goal. It's the power of perserverance.
At the same time, as you said “still remember why you loved the person at the beginning,” I think that can be applied on a bigger scale to any goal as well. You rememeber your goals and keep them in front of you, especially during hard times, when it's easy to question yourself as to why you're doing something in the first place. I know this from experience. I can't tell you enough how many times I would sit down and reexamine why the hell I chose to be an actor.
Will Smith says his marriage works because as you said, he survives and works through it. Of course they have problems, but they had one mutual agreement: divorce is not an option (nevermind that this is his 2nd marriage). It's the sign of a true committment, “burning the ships” is what they call it. It's a term not too many people are familiar with, because of the need for security.
Perhaps, in this age, we have too many options, too many choices: Wal Mart or Target, this barber or the one down the street, this career or another, and when something appears to go wrong, we can easily turn away. But that's not always a good thing, especially when so many rewards come along later down any given path.
I enjoyed your post Monica. I'm always trying to make my relationship survive
“You survive. You do what’s necessary and make it through the downs so you can enjoy the ups.”
I think this piece of advice works toward anything you want to accomplish. Then, you make sure you keep surviving, because you only lose when you're out of time and you haven't achieved said goal. It's the power of perserverance.
At the same time, as you said “still remember why you loved the person at the beginning,” I think that can be applied on a bigger scale to any goal as well. You rememeber your goals and keep them in front of you, especially during hard times, when it's easy to question yourself as to why you're doing something in the first place. I know this from experience. I can't tell you enough how many times I would sit down and reexamine why the hell I chose to be an actor.
Will Smith says his marriage works because as you said, he survives and works through it. Of course they have problems, but they had one mutual agreement: divorce is not an option (nevermind that this is his 2nd marriage). It's the sign of a true committment, “burning the ships” is what they call it. It's a term not too many people are familiar with, because of the need for security.
Perhaps, in this age, we have too many options, too many choices: Wal Mart or Target, this barber or the one down the street, this career or another, and when something appears to go wrong, we can easily turn away. But that's not always a good thing, especially when so many rewards come along later down any given path.
I enjoyed your post Monica. I'm always trying to make my relationship survive