Me and Myself

Today marks two months of marriage for Jon and I. That being said, I suppose it’s about time that I share our story: how we met, how we started dating, how he proposed, and all that other fun stuff that people like to know. So, without further ado, here it is:

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Lindsey who met a boy named Jon. The two of them fell madly in love at first sight and, after a couple of dates, decided that they would try dating exclusively. Their dating life was perfect: nothing but romantic picnics in the mountains at dusk that faded away into Hollywood-worthy evenings underneath the stars. Every moment with each other was bliss and the two of them couldn’t recall a happier time in their lives. Because everything was going so perfect, the two of them decided to get married. The date was set, everything fell into place, the marriage happened, and the two have experienced nothing but more joy and love and everything else perfect ever since…

…Except for that’s not at all how it happened and any suggestion that Jon and my dating life was perfect is farther from the truth than the South Pole is from the North Pole. Heavens, no. Dating Jon was most definitely both the most fun and most stressful thing I have ever done, and trying to decide whether or not to marry him was even more so (emphasize the stressful part on that one). And while I could sit here and paint for you the most perfect and wonderful picture, telling you only about the good and leaving out the bad, I want to be more real with you than that. Why? Because there’s this stigma in our culture that tries to tell us that dating and marriage and relationships in general are happy and easy and wonderful and that if you’re having a hard time with yours, it must be wrong—get out fast—jump ship. And while a happy and healthy relationship will provide you with more joy and wonder than anything else in life, my experience begs to differ with any person or movie or book or television ad that suggests that falling in love and getting married is only the ease and the joy and the wonder. It’s not. It may vary from couple to couple, but every couple experiences their own share of heartache, hard times, and struggles. Before I started dating Jon I knew this. I expected it. But even though I knew it would be hard, I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was or for what kind of hard it was. As a result, I spent much of my dating experience confused over whether or not things were hard because dating is hard or because dating Jon was hard, and therefore, probably not meant to be.

I want to paint a realistic picture of what meeting and dating and breaking-up and getting back together and getting engaged and (finally!) getting married to Jon was like so that other people in relationships can know that they’re not alone in the crazy inward battle over whether or not things are meant to be and so that they can also know that when things are hard it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re wrong. Because it’s such a long story, or rather, because there’s so much to say, I’m going to be breaking it up and posting bits and pieces of it over the next several weeks. I have no idea how many parts it will end up being, so I guess we’ll just have to see how long or short-winded I end up being. Regardless, take our not-so-fairy-tale-perfect love story for what it is, for even though it’s not tidy enough to end up in the pages of a fairy tale, Jon and I still regard it as the most wonderful love story we’ve ever heard of. Of course, we’re biased, but that’s okay. It was perfect for us and gave us both what we perfectly needed: an opportunity to grow, some heartache, lots of laughter, a search for identity, a chance to draw closer to God, and—above all—it gave us each other. 

(to be continued...)