The Realities of Marrying Your High School Sweetheart

             A couple of naïve 16-year olds start dating. Clearly, this is not a story that often has many chapters. Somehow our story turned into War and Peace.

Growing up with your spouse is a rare occurrence. It leads to a relationship founded from adolescence with unusual developments.  Like all relationships, a drawn-out high school sweetheart relationship has plenty of high and lows.

Positives:

• We know everything about each other.
  • After spending more than half our lives together, and only being in our very early thirties, it’s not surprising that very little is left to the imagination. We can finish each other’s thoughts. We can both predict what the other is going to do or say in a given situation. Our ideas for the future are not novel from one another because working on a future together has become so natural. We know when something is wrong with the other before they are even aware of it themselves.
• My experiences are OUR experiences.
  • All of our firsts are together. First car, first time (strongly related to the first car), first apartment, first pet, first house, first real jobs, and first baby. All my life experiences are linked to his. This gives us common ground that holds one hell of a foundation.
• Deliberate individuality.
  • Becoming who I am today would not have happened without him. I learned to be who I am because he is who he is. I have been able to develop into someone I want to be without the worry of trying to impress someone else. I have had my own personal cheerleader by my side most of my life.
• Dear God the compromises.
  • Every marriage is full of compromises. Luckily when you spend practically your whole life with someone there is a good indication that you’ve mastered the art of the compromise. Compromise has become something that we can talk logically about and at this point rarely leads to conflict. The give and take parts of our relationship have equaled out naturally over time.

Negatives

• We know everything about each other.
  • We know all the ugly stuff too. The mistakes, the bad decisions, the regrets. We have a history going back to our teenage years of being inconsiderate of each other and hurting each other. Those memories do not fade, only accumulate. In situations where our tempers are in full force the memories of all the bad moments can disguise the good.
• My experiences are OUR experiences.
  • All of our firsts are together. That includes the undesirable. Parts of my life I would rather forget I can’t. I can’t because I live with a constant reminder of what happened, because it happened to him too.
• Deliberate individuality.
  • Discovering who I am took more effort. Being with someone from teenage years on, it can be difficult to define where he ends and I begin. There have been times in my life that I had to deliberately detangle our relationship and assert that I am an individual. And a badass one at that.
• Dear God the compromises.
  • The amount of compromises that have been made on both sides in our relationship are immeasurable. There is a worry that neither of us will be able to fulfill our own vision for complete happiness, because we have to keep the other person’s needs in mind. Limitations have been set on both sides throughout the years. That being said we have to work to have open and honest communication in order for the compromises not to hinder our relationship.

I love the hell out of my husband. He is one of those people who you meet and find instantly interesting. Not only is he gorgeous but he has this internal glow that is indescribable. He is funny, delightfully inappropriate, and way too smart for his own good.   I’m lucky to have him. He’s lucky to have me too.