I haven’t written much this summer, but this is not a post to apologize for that. It’s a post to come clean about part of the reason I haven’t written.
The truth is I’ve been focusing on my marriage. Rebuilding it, in fact. Which seems a little ridiculous, considering I have been married less than two years and a marriage should not get broken that soon.
People are always shocked that I’m married when they meet me. Like jaw dropping, please excuse me while I pick my mouth up off the floor, shocked. After all, I’m 24 years old, I’m in graduate school, and I’m working at a start up. My husband is a full-time student in a four year professional optometrist program. And we’re both seemingly a little self-absorbed with our careers.
I spent an entire year focusing on everything else. For a year I neglected my marriage, thinking that I could “have it all” without putting much work into it.
And now, my generation is obsessed with talking about marriage. There is a lot of talk from single people about why they are not married, why they are waiting to get married, or why they don’t think there’s a point to marriage. There are also a lot of married people in Gen Y that are happily married, or happily engaged. And don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for them.
What annoys me is when people write about their lovey dovey marriages as if it’s all rainbows and sunshine. I don’t think I’m jealous – I just want to taste reality in those posts. Because let’s face it – marriage does not have much in common with a bag of Skittles.
But when something is as dear to your heart as your marriage, it takes a lot of courage to write about the bad days. This is why nobody my age writes about how hard it is to be young and married, and how it’s exceptionally difficult when both people want careers also.
I do write about it. All the time. And let me tell you, marriage is not about being in love. E and I have been in love since we first met. That stuff is easy. The hard part of marriage is in the details. Because marriage is really about taking your turn at washing dishes and making sure the mortgage gets paid on time. Pulling the shower curtain shut after a bath and not leaving wet clothes in the laundry machine for long periods. You get the picture.
That’s how we fixed our marriage. I started washing dishes. E started inviting me out to dinner more (after we were sure we could pay the mortgage). We stopped pretending that we were two individuals trying to make sense of our careers, who just so happened to be married to each other. We started to put each other first again. And now that we’ve had our first major trial in marriage, a little ahead of schedule, I feel like I could maybe never let our marriage fall apart like that again.
But you never know. Marriage is the decision that you will never know if you made correctly. Ever. That’s the other part no one talks about, because nobody wants to talk about how they sometimes wonder if they made a mistake on their marriage.
If you have advice about how to keep a marriage together, please don’t email me about it. You do not know what’s best for me, and in the end, this post is really not about solving my problems. It’s about telling another truth about marriage to my generation, because I know there are young married couples out there who do not feel lovey dovey anymore and cannot figure out why. Don’t give up. Things can get better if you pay attention to the little stuff.
Valentine’s Day is here, and whether you like it or hate it you can’t help but notice it.
Here are some links to get you through today; and hopefully a few will make you chuckle at the least.
For Single Men:
Stop Hanging Out With Women and Start Dating Them - I almost left a comment, but felt like I was intruding on poker night. A must-read for young guys.
For Men in a Relationship:
Cracking the Valentine’s Day Code - Find out what “don’t get me anything” means to a woman… you still have time to change your Valentine’s day gift before dinner tonight…
For Single Women:
Advice For Valentine’s Day – “You can choose to be miserable tomorrow – or you can adopt my strategy and have a pretty fun (and memorable) day.” This sounds like the best idea ever.
For Women In a Relationship:
A Manly Gift for Valentine’s Day - Malt Whiskey Chocolates… what else? The guys I work with love this stuff… and I bet your guy would too.
I’m not doing anything special today, but what the hey: cute little cherubs dressed in loincloths never hurt anyone. Happy Valentine’s Day!
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.
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!
