On March 7, 2015, my husband asked me to officially be his girlfriend. It wasn't a particularly romantic moment (we were in our college's campus coffee shop), but it was in many ways the beginnings of the life we now have.
Even though we looked pretty cute together (if I may say so), our dating relationship was hardly picture-perfect. Immaturity, selfishness, and insecurity make it difficult to love one another well, and we spent a great deal of the three and a half years of knowing one another prior to getting married trying to unlearn these patterns and create better ones for ourselves.
We didn't know it at the time, but when we were dating, we were doing a lot of the hard work people told us we would do once we got married. Because we had to figure out how to trust, serve, and forgive each other as a dating couple, we transitioned with relative ease into doing that as husband and wife.
While I know we had exactly the dating experience we needed to have in order to be the couple we are today (i.e. a couple that actually got married and still likes each other), I do sometimes wish we had navigated that stage of our lives with more grace and wisdom than we actually did. If I could go back and share with our past selves some of the most transformative lessons of the last five years, this is what I would tell them.
1. People grow up.
Mitchell and I fell in love when we were eighteen years old. Legally, we may have been adults, but mentally and emotionally, we were still a lot more immature than we would have cared to admit. And because we were immature, we (and by we, I mostly mean Mitchell) did a lot of immature things.
But the beauty of knowing each other in these pivotal years of young adulthood has been that we've gotten to see each other grow out of a lot of that immaturity. I'm not sure which part of has been more rewarding: seeing him go from habitually oversleeping our 8:15 classes in college to routinely waking up by 5:30 so he can get to his classroom an hour before school starts or discovering that he can grow a full beard. I wish I had known when we were dating that, over time, he would outgrow many of the habits that I was so concerned about.
2. Communicate, communicate, communicate.
There's a reason this statement was the most frequently repeated advice from our pastor in premarital counseling. You're never going to fix your problems if you don't talk about them.
When we were dating, the silent treatment was my preferred method of conflict resolution. If Mitchell did something that bothered me (which tended to happen about every six months), I would just stop talking to him for a couple of days. And while I liked to think I was doing that so I wouldn't say something hurtful before I could collect my thoughts, in reality, I was trying to punish him for failing to meet my unrealistically high standards.
The horrible thing about marriage, though, is that it becomes virtually impossible to maintain the silent treatment when you live together, eat together, and sleep together. Eventually, you have to talk to each other. And when you actually discuss the issue like rational adults, you can work out a solution. What a novel concept!
3. Invest time into your relationship.
The first semester of our junior year was the most exhausting point of my college career. I was taking 18 credits (most of which were project-intensive education classes), working 15+ hours a week, and trying to maintain some semblance of a dating relationship with a guy who was also taking a full class load and working. Unsurprisingly, our relationship was pretty miserable.
After two of the worst fights in the history of our relationship, we were seriously questioning whether we should break things off or stick it out. But we agreed that it made more sense to try rebuilding a healthy relationship than it did to break up, so we decided to stay together––and to actually be together as much as we could, even if that was only a couple hours at a time once or twice a week.
As we made more intentional choices about spending our time, we rediscovered that we did in fact still like each other; we had just been failing to remind one another of that. The happiest times in our relationship have been the times when, even amidst busy schedules (such as the one we're currently operating under, which has Mitchell gone roughly 60 hours a week and me either at work or doing school from sunup to sundown), we've carved out time to connect.
4. You're supposed to be two different people.
When I first met Mitchell, I got the sense that he and I were a lot alike. We both had similar ambitions for the future; we both liked a lot of the same books and movies; we both struggled to find a friend group where we fit freshman year––we even looked alike.
But as I got to know Mitchell––and as we began growing into ourselves––I started to realize that we were much less alike than I had originally thought. We didn't have all the same opinions or hobbies or personality traits. But as I shared last month in this post, I've come to see that it's actually a wonderful thing that we're not the same person. If we were, as my dad says, one of us would be unnecessary.
5. To love at all is to be vulnerable.
For my nineteenth birthday, Mitchell gave me a bracelet with this C.S. Lewis quotation on it, and I wore it until I wore it out. This truth became so important to our relationship that I incorporated it into my wedding bouquet as well as our vows.
To love is to be vulnerable. To love is to open yourself up to the possibility of hurt, misunderstanding, shame, and loss. To love is to risk, to sacrifice, and possibly even to still lose anyway.
For much of the first year of our relationship, I refused to be vulnerable with Mitchell. I didn't even tell him I loved him until a literal year after he had first said it to me. I figured that if I didn't allow myself to get emotionally attached, it would be easier for me to detach if the relationship ended. And while I do think there is wisdom in not baring your soul to someone the first night you meet, there comes a point at which you have to set aside your emotional armor and open yourself up to the possibility of being hurt. To love is to be vulnerable, yes. But to love is also to be human. We were designed to experience intimate relationships with one another, and when we cut ourselves off from intimacy, we isolate ourselves from our own humanity. It's scary to be fully known by another person, but it's even more frightening to become a person who lives without loving.
In the grand scheme of our lives, five years isn't very long. We have so much more to learn about marriage, relationships, and love, and we look forward to doing that together for as many years as God gives us. But I do think that, as we reach such milestones in our relationship, it is good to pause and look back on where we came from, and it is good to be grateful, both for the miles traveled together and for those up ahead.