Courtship

Recently I've been wondering how different our wedding and these first few months of marriage would have been had our timing been different.

We married on Labor Day weekend in September--exactly one year after our first date. Neither of us can remember exactly when we got engaged (yeah, that seems weird to us too, but we started talking about getting married so very shortly after our first date) but it must have been March or April because I remember saying to myself many times how I only had about five months within which to plan the wedding.

In many ways only having a few months for wedding planning was a blessing. It wasn't the best experience and I can only imagine that it gets more complicated when you don't have as much pressure to just MAKE A DECISION. But I do think that if we'd planned for a year we'd have done some things differently, or done more of it ourselves and saved money. Or maybe it's just that we would have had a better understanding of ourselves as a couple and that knowledge could have helped to prioritize our decisions.

And that leads to the other side of my wonderings: how would our marriage be different today if we'd known each other as well as we do now (or better even) before starting to plan a wedding and a life together? It seems that I'm learning something new about my husband at least every week, if not more. Not just little things like the fact that he hates black licorice, but things about his character, his dreams, habits and needs and patterns.

Are these things I should have known in advance or are these just things that come from living with/being married to someone no matter how long you've been together?

Nearly half of our courtship consisted of planning a wedding--which doesn't resemble real life. And now we find ourselves in this thing called marriage, in which he is my spouse and I am his. And some days it is really hard. We don't have a well of experiences to reach into. We don't have shared adventures and stories and friends. We can't look back and think of times that were worse or better than this. This short year is all we have had.

But we have many years in front of us. And I suppose in the long run that's all that really matters.