A Quiet Love

I am very in love with my husband, though we've fought hard to get here. Our relationship didn't have the easiest of starts. We met online, tried a long distance relationship by spending hours and hours talking late into the night. He took a cross country trip to spend a week with me, and it was wonderful. Of course it was wonderful, we were two people in love who were finally able to be together in person. The week didn't last long enough, and we decided that I would move from Oklahoma to Virginia to be with him. Five months later, I was transplanted.

And I promptly discovered all the tiny habits and details that I hadn't been exposed to or noticed during the week long visit. I didn't know about his terrible cleaning habits, the way he would become obsessed with something and the way our personalities would clash. You see, I am a person who for the most part prefers silence, but at times feels a driving need for conversation, to explore a thought, and to listen to someone else talk. My husband is someone who for the most part will talk about whatever is on his mind, and at times goes quiet and contemplative. These times never seem to match up quite right.

In those first two years that I lived with him, it was rough. We would fight as any couple does, but it all seemed so much heavier. Maybe it was because we had gone from "friends with sometimes risque phone conversations" to live-in partners and that is quite the large step, and maybe it was because I was suddenly 1400 miles from the safety of knowing where I was, having a job, having a family, and having a feeling that if things went south I could just leave. Every fight seemed to be a big deal, every tension was a deal breaker.

But somehow, the fights would ebb quickly, the problems and the struggles were overwhelmed by the sheer happiness and comfort that we brought each other. While there were times I threatened that it was over, set ultimatums, threw a large bottle of glue at him, there were more times when he would hold me during my struggles with depression, stayed at my side no matter how shitty of a human being I seemed to be, and genuinely understood and supported me in a way that no one else ever had. And we talked, and argued, and made up, and eventually something clicked and we both started to change in ways that I think made us even better for each other.

Monday night is New Years Eve. Five years ago, I spent it on the phone with him, playing Puzzle Pirates while we chatted, he exhausted from having come home from work and needing to go back in relatively early the next morning, and I getting drunker on cheap champagne as the minutes ticked by. I remember we talked about resolutions, as every one does on New Years, and I wondered, as I always do, what I would be doing on a New Years Eve five years from then.

I was sure, in love and happy at that moment, that I would be married to Matt, that he would be my first kiss of the New Year, and I hoped that in five years time that our little family would be even more than just he and I. And I sit here tonight, flipping through pictures of us in October of 2011, and what do you know, I was right.

We haven't had a perfect love story, and but what a story it has been. We're both still doing our best, and I'm snuggled here, thinking of my fantastic husband and the baby that is rolling and squirming away in my stomach, and oh my, oh my, I do believe I like our love the best.