My dad asked me today if I would have still gotten married as young as I did if he and my mom hadn’t moved away that year. I told him probably because my hubby was going away to college in the fall. I want to explore that thought more.
I love my husband and I treasure the life we have built together. I don’t wish that were different. Maybe pieces of it, but not if it meant changing what we have today.
We got engaged in my junior year of high school. I knew it was going to happen when he told me he had a surprise and made me close my eyes as he drove us to our date that night. I remember being nervous.
He had said he loved me early in our relationship and I said it back to him. I knew I loved him more than anyone I’d ever loved before. We hadn’t followed God’s will in our relationship, so I worried that our relationship as a whole was outside of God’s will. Now I know it was just our behavior that didn’t follow God’s will.
We started dating at 15 and 17. I had never had a real boyfriend before. He was so handsome and funny. I loved being around him. We flirted like crazy…over-the-top, ridiculous flirting. It was so much fun! He joked and played, and I reciprocated. We simply had fun together. We could talk for hours on end and still want to be together and talk longer after time was up. The first time we ever broke my curfew was because we were talking and lost track of the time. We were talking of marriage within months of beginning to date.
We were so close, so fast, people talked about us. We were bullied and rumors went around about us. We received a lot of criticism and negative comments about our relationship. The negativity in addition to my own self-doubt filled me with uncertainty. I desperately wanted to do what God’s will for me was. And that is what made me so nervous of the proposal. I was scared that all those naysayers were right, and I was acting apart from God.
I wish that I would have had confidence in myself and in the truth of our relationship. That is where my youth and immaturity came at a disadvantage. How much more I would have enjoyed and treasured that proposal and our wedding planning! Instead, I spent countless nights stressing over the what ifs and questioning everything I felt and thought. When I finally got down to the nitty gritty of all my worries, I knew without a doubt that I loved him. And that was the reason I said yes. That was the reason I didn’t follow the naysayers. I love him with all of me. I always have and always will.
We chose to get married the summer after I graduated high school. He was going away to go to college. My parents were moving to another state. I didn’t believe in living together unless we were married. So, we got married. The timing just made sense, even if we were terribly young.
If my parents hadn’t moved, would we have planned our wedding for later? Possibly. I don’t know for sure. We still would have spent all of our extra time together and talked on the phone constantly. I really couldn’t say. We might have gotten married anyway, just to be together. On second thought…we may have planned our wedding for later that same year to be on the anniversary of when we first started dating. We considered that before we knew my parents were moving away.
What would I have changed?
1. Followed God’s will for our choices early in our relationship.
2. Held onto confidence in what I knew to be true. Taken less stock in what other people said.
3. Insisted on our original chosen date for our wedding, even if that meant a justice of the peace wedding rather than the pastor who only married us because he knew we’d do it whether or not he was the officiant (he even told us this).
4. Had more fun planning our wedding to represent our personalities better. I would have liked to sing or at least walk down the aisle to our song. I’d skip the lunch part of our reception and just have simple cake and nuts/dinner mints.
