A (long) love story....

On Wednesday, we celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary. Four years! 

I'm guessing that the vast majority of you already know the story of how we met/got engaged/got married.  I'm going to tell you again anyway.

 It's going to be a long story. I'm warning you now.

I've known my husband since I was twelve years old. That's right - we met in middle school! We were the two students selected for the leadership council at our school, which just means that we sat in really boring meetings with a bunch of faculty and administrators that pretended to want our input on policies, procedures, events, etc.

We became friends through the leadership council and summers at the local pool. I had a membership to the pool and could be found there basically every day, and he often came with a friend of ours that had a membership too. I thought he was adorable and had the hugest crush on him (my now husband, not his friend).

By 8th grade, I guess he decided I was cute too and asked me to be his girlfriend. In 8th grade, that means we talked on the phone - and that's all. But he was so painfully shy that I could barely even get him to talk on the phone! As a fourteen year old girl that wanted to be showered with attention, it just didn't work. Like any other fickle fourteen year old girl, I started "dating" another boy that actually paid attention to me.

I did agree to be his date for the homecoming dance during our freshman year of high school. I still had a huge crush on him, but he was still painfully shy for the most part. We had a great time at the dance. He was so adorable, and he did kiss me at the end of the night. It was his first kiss! Who marries the first person you kissed?? My husband does, and thank goodness for that!

Anyway, a few days after the dance, he asked me to be his girlfriend again - via email! I wonder if he remembers this part... but I turned him down. Probably because he asked in an email.

For the next several years, we continued to be really good friends. We spent a lot of time together outside of school, sometimes in a group and sometimes on our own. He helped me through a few high school break ups, and I even set him up with a few girls along the way! My boyfriends were frequently jealous of our friendship and accused us of being more than friends, but it really was just a platonic friendship at that point.

Then, our senior year, something changed. We ended up kissing one night, and at first I thought it was one of those random high school kisses that don't amount to anything. But after a few days went by, it didn't feel random.

I actually remember the moment I realized I had feelings for him beyond friendship. It was on the bus ride home from an away football game. I was a cheerleader, and another cheerleader and good friend of mine had noticed that my now husband had showed up to watch the game without any friends. She had also managed to notice that we were acting a little differently toward one another. She called me out on it on the ride home - and I admitted that we had kissed. She followed up by asking me why we weren't a couple, and I couldn't think of an answer for her. I just didn't have one. And then I knew that I didn't want to be just his friend anymore, and luckily he had come to the same conclusion.

We decided to give dating a shot - a real shot. He had dated a few other people and he was no longer afraid of girls (sorry babe, but it's true!). So, we dated for three years, which spanned our senior year of high school and our first two years of college. We went to different colleges, which made it difficult at times - but I was only one hour away and so we still saw each other frequently. 

He asked me to marry him on September 25th, 2007. It was his 21st birthday. He told me that all he wanted for his birthday was for me to agree to be his wife. Isn't that incredibly sweet?

We got married on June 20, 2008. It was the summer before our last year in college. We were young, but I'd known him for so long - I knew what I was doing.

So almost eight years into our relationship and four years of marriage later, I couldn't be happier. Some people criticized us for getting married so young, and not without valid points.

I can't deny that we are entirely different people than we were at twenty-one/twenty-two. As we have become more educated and experienced more in life, our personalities and opinions on things have evolved. I wouldn't even recognize my twenty-one year old self in the mirror.

We are lucky, however, in the fact that we've grown in the same direction. We realize that too often, people that get married grow in opposite directions. It could have easily happened to us, and we realize that too. But it didn't, and we are more in love and in sync with one another now than we have ever been before - and I am so lucky.

We're incredibly lucky to have each other and I try to remember that fact each and every day.

So, now you know our whole life story.