Five Years Later

Photo by Figment Photography

I didn't expect much out of my freshman year of college. My plan was to pass my classes with decent grades and make at least a couple friends. I had no aspirations of dating anybody until at least my junior year (lol @ freshman me for thinking junior year education major me would have time to date). So, naturally, I met the love of my life a month into my first semester of college–five years ago this week, to be exact.

I remember thinking he looked like he should be a cartoon character–short with a high forehead and a cheerful nose, always in glasses and bow ties. Once or twice I had heard him ask our professors questions, and they had been insightful enough to make me think I might like to be friends with this kid.

Really, that was all I was going for: friends. Mitchell likes to joke that I hit on him, but the truth is that my normal seat was taken, and the first available one in the next row happened to be beside him. And five years later, I'm still sitting beside him, only now we're holding hands and wearing wedding bands.

It all happened so fast: he went from cramming for quizzes before class with me to asking me on a date to telling me he liked me within less than eight weeks. He says that, by the end of our first date, he was pretty sure I was the one, and while it took me much longer to reach the same conclusion, I do remember feeling as though I had found someone I had been looking for all my life. I began to understand why people refer to their spouses as their "other half": the two of you together comprise something that far surpasses what you are individually. "He makes you more . . . you," my best friend told me, and I, by all accounts, did the same for him.

Yet after three and a half years of dating and over a year of marriage, the me I was at eighteen is gone. The boy I fell in love with is gone as well, transfigured into a very different man than the Mitchell Allen I met five years ago. It is only to be expected; the human brain does not even reach full development until age 25. And our lives have been in constant flux for as long as we've known each other. Each of us has changed schedules, started different jobs, dropped old habits and implemented new ones, gotten haircuts, developed our interests. We graduated from college, dated long-distance, almost broke up multiple times, got married, established a household, started our careers–change after change after change. New titles, new responsibilities, new people emerging in the aftermath of it all only to be remade not long after.

So often I hear of marriages that collapse for this very reason: "You've changed." An accusation, a betrayal of cherished memories. Feeling they are too different to fit together any longer, the two drift apart.

Yet such is our nature. The self is not immutable, as much as we might wish it to be. I have changed and will continue to do so. Mitchell has done the same. I anticipate that our future will be full of yet more changes–some we have encountered before and some brand-new, some unexpected and some eagerly awaited. And I trust the changes will be to our benefit. No, I didn't marry the same man I first fell in love with, but I can hardly complain that I traded the shy-seeming kid in my freshman lecture classes for the generous, passionate man I know today.

And truly, this is the gift of marrying young: you don't just grow old together–you grow up together. You become yourselves alongside one another as you learn to cultivate the best of who you are and leave immaturity and selfishness behind. And while I know we have so far to go, I look forward to taking this journey hand in hand and side by side for as long as we both shall live.