If you've spent any amount of time on our blog lately, you would know that we are approaching 10 years of marriage later on this year. Because of this milestone approaching, I've spent a lot of time thinking about our years together. The good, the hard, the sad, the fun! We've done a lot of living together! I have decided to spend some time doing a series on our history together and what I can still remember of it!
So we must start at the beginning, not at the very beginning, but the beginning of when we became "us".
When I say we were two kids, I mean we were two kids. We started our relationship at possibly the worst time ever and I would not recommend for anyone to start a relationship the summer before they start college. But when it is meant to be, it is meant to be and nothing will stop fate I guess.
So, near the end of our senior year at our very small private school, we started becoming good friends. We started hanging out more and just getting to know each other. I think while we may have been developing feelings for each other, we didn't really want to go there because we knew we were graduating soon and moving on with life.
Well, things didn't quite work out that way. On our grad night Peter kept debating whether or not to ask me out. He finally worked up the nerve to ask, but then a bunch of classmates were around us so he backed down. I'm not sure if he would have ever worked up the nerve to ask again, if it wasn't for our bus breaking down. We were stranded on the side of the road, waiting for a ride when he finally had ample time to ask me to be his girlfriend. The whole conversation was a bit silly now, neither one of us wanting to admit our feelings first. But it ended with the words engraved inside my wedding band to this day "I'm interested" and us exiting the bus as a couple.
From there, we really just wanted to spend every moment of the summer together. We knew that our time was limited but we tried not to think about that! We wanted to keep things as casual as possible because of this inevitable separation at the end of the summer, but within weeks we were dealing with very serious feelings for one another, ones we had never experienced before. We suddenly found ourselves in a position where we couldn't imagine life without each other. This was not the plan!
I remember spending many evenings together, wishing that we were older and more established in life so we could get married and be together. But we were so young! I had no idea what I was going to do with my life and Peter had four years of college ahead of him. There was just no way we would make marriage work, even though that was all we wanted. We were resigned to make our relationship work as best we could. We knew it would be very difficult, but we also knew it was worth it! We were two young kids, completely in love! If we had to wait 4 years to get married, we would wait 4 years to get married.
I will never forget the end of the summer and our last day spent together. We didn't want it to end. I couldn't imagine him being away. We tried to avoid the inevitable end of the evening. After a fun day spent at the beach just hanging out and sitting in the sand, dreaming about our future, I burst into tears at dinner. It was just too hard to know the goodbye was coming. We stayed out as late as we could before that inevitable last hug and kiss that was supposed to last for the next several months.
The first days of him being gone were so hard. I felt depressed without him there and didn't know how we were going to survive without seeing each other. But before long we got into a routine. I started working and saving money, he studied during the day, and washed dishes in the evening to save up money for a ring. We were going to make this work. We spent hours upon hours on the phone together until we'd literally fall asleep talking to each other. We grew a lot during that time. We got to know each other really well in a relatively short amount of time. I went up to visit him in October, he came home for Thanksgiving and permanently at Christmas. The distance was just too much for us, and our hearts knew what they knew. As crazy as the dream seemed to others, we had to get married! We would work as hard as we needed to make all the other details work, the only thing we knew is that we needed to face life together!
