A Decade

Yesterday, Andrew and I celebrated ten years of marriage.

Seriously.

Ten Years.

I feel the need to declare that I was a mere baby when we got hitched at the Fayetteville Courthouse, but I'm sure that math is obvious.

Had you been there that day, you'd remember me as the girl with a pixie cut sitting alone on a bench in a white dress.  I drove myself there while Andrew picked up my Mom from the airport and waited nervously worried that nobody, including Andrew, would show up.

Slowly, family started pouring in and we filled that little courtroom up with people we'd known all our lives.  I'm sure 99.9% of them thought the wedding was a bad idea.  I'd say 100%, but there were some children 5 and under that had no clue what we were even doing there.

10 years later, I can look back and think, "what the heck were we thinking?!?!"

I see 19 year olds now and am sure they are entirely too young to even own a car let alone bind their life to someone else's for all of eternity.  We both admit that we probably should have waited a bit longer if for no other reason then to not have to buy our own groceries quite so soon.

It wasn't the wedding of my dreams, but then again, I've never really dreamed of my wedding so I had nothing to compare it to.

Married at the courthouse, pictures at a dried up waterfall, lunch at an all you can eat chicken place, and a homemade cake with frosting completely missing from the back side.  The entire day was completely amateur.  I look at my friend's weddings and think I should probably be at least a little embarrassed of my big day or lack thereof.

But the day was us.

It was the start of the hardest and most exciting ten years of my life.  Being married to a man with as much passion and drive as Andrew is never boring.  He keeps me on my toes and gets me to try things that this Nervous Nelly would never do on my own.  We have made colossal mistakes that we are still paying for, but we've made some unbelievably amazing decisions too.

Starting with that hot May night when we decided the day didn't matter.  It was the life that followed that we would invest in.  We didn't need a year long engagement in order to sort out all of the little details.

We needed to belong to each other and that was enough.

It still is.

This marriage has been my greatest adventure.

Andrew is my home base.  My rock.  He is insane and goofy and eats entire watermelons in bed, on our white sheets, at 11 PM.  He has the ability to drive me completely insane and get me to laugh at all my idiosyncrasies.

I tell him when his big ideas get a little too big and keep his socks clean.

We've got a good thing going here.  I'm sure it's as cleshay as it gets, but the years have flown by.  How on Earth did we go from 19 year olds who could spend all day driving aimlessly to 30 year olds with a mortgage and two little people?

I'm so glad for that little courthouse and everything that came after.

Maybe we weren't as crazy as everyone thought we were.