I’m a pretty indecisive person. If you ask me to choose a restaurant for dinner or a movie to watch, nine times out of ten I will hesitate for so long, you’ll just go hungry. But, for as long as I can remember, the idea of marriage has been something I have been 100 percent set on. It is a tradition I love and have always wanted to be a part of. As a young girl, I couldn’t wait to wear the beautiful dress, hold my father’s arm down the aisle and marry the man of my dreams.
Several years later and I am married to a wonderful man at the ripe old age of 21. And he really is the man of my dreams – I have had a crush on him since the tender age of 11. But now that we are one full year on into this new adventure, I’ve found myself wondering if we made the right decision.
Did we get married too young? Should we have waited until everyone around us was at the same point in their lives? Is marriage something that should be measured by society? Or age?
These questions often plagued my brain during the months leading up to my wedding and still do. Except that knowing whether Steve was the one has never been a problem. Feeling the confused gaze of my peers was. Our engagement was a year long and over that time I was overly conscious of people’s reactions when I told them I was engaged. Their words were often happy, but their faces said, ‘wow she’s young.’ Because of this, I lost courage in my decisions for the wedding as well as our future as a married couple. Would we survive? I felt like I wasn’t tall enough to ride the marriage rollercoaster.
I struggled with modern culture and traditions over my deep commitment to the man I loved. And I would like to say that all these feelings went away once we tied the knot, but I can’t. I still come up against the looks and fears that we jumped too quick.
And yet every time I considered my commitment towards Steve I was content in a way that I had never known before. We had worked hard on our relationship over the years and while it wasn’t perfect there was a balance in the way we responded to each other, how we communicated and reacted to one another that solidified any doubts bubbling up in the back of my mind.
Maybe we should have waited I mean, love is patient right? And it is, I agree wholeheartedly. But love doesn’t know that.
Love does whatever it wants, and it wanted us to be one human with two bodies. And so that’s what we are.
And when it all comes down to it, I love being married. It is not at all what I imagined and then sometimes it is. It’s messy and magical, you have to share your favourite pillow sometimes, you never get to eat anything in completion, and it’s the best decision I’ve ever made.
