semi-anniversary

Dave and I got married six months ago today! I still remember the disbelief we felt when we woke up the day after the wedding: wait, are we really married? Did that just happen? Was it all a dream? I'm so glad it turned out to be real.

I don't have any wisdom to share, nor am I really able to process yet what has happened in the past six months. I'll need more time for that. I'm still unbelievably happy to be married to Dave. Sometimes, I hear people say that marriage didn't change their lives much. Maybe they had already lived together before marriage, or there were no other major life changes that occurred at the same time, so they had a chance to adjust to marriage gently and gradually. This wasn't the case for me: we had never lived together, and around the time of the wedding, I was also graduating, moving, and starting my first real job. Sometimes it feels like everything changed.

I can't say that the beginning of our marriage was how I had pictured marriage would be. Yes, we went on a lovely honeymoon. We get to live with each other sometimes. We are sharing our lives and learning what it means (i.e., how hard it is) to love someone as much as you love yourself. But there are some ways in which this beginning has felt traumatic to me: our time apart in August/September, when I realized that I couldn't do the long-distance thing anymore; the looming knowledge of separation in the winter; the delicate and complex dynamics of supporting each other's career goals, at possibly very real costs to one's own, etc. I've wanted to yell back at life, "I'm not ready! One thing at a time! This is TOO MUCH." There are silver linings, I know. I treasure each day we wake up in the same bed; I know in a deep way how precious our relationship is, and won't take it for granted in the future (I hope! keep me accountable).

Even though these trials have come, and I'm not exactly handling them as well as I would have hoped (see everything tagged "mental health"), I'm still grateful to have Dave as my partner and teammate, and for his patience with me. We are not out of the woods yet, in terms of career uncertainties and difficulties. But sometimes we say to each other, "Gosh, maybe there will come a day when we'll look back at this time and think, 'Boy, we had it easy then! All we had to worry about were our jobs!'" And maybe when that day comes, I'll be thankful for this early period, when we learned to listen carefully and encourage each other in a hard time.