Always & Never

Some thoughts after my first child's wedding

My eldest child got married this past weekend. It still feels surreal, and I continue to nurse an emotional hangover. So much love, joy, and celebration jam packed into a few hours.

Watching these two beloved humans start the journey of building their family got me thinking about my own young marriage, and a piece of long-ago advice I gave all three of my children that I’m now thankful they didn’t follow.

My husband Troy and I met when I was freshman and he was a junior in college. We didn’t like each other at first, then we became genuine friends, and later, after we both were finally single, started dating. A whopping six months later, we got engaged. When we got married, I was twenty-one and he was twenty-three. At the time, we didn’t think twice about our ages. We were young, thought we knew everything, and were madly in love. We were also stupid lucky we chose well at such young ages. This year we’ll celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary, and we still genuinely like each other, and count the other as our favorite person to hang out with.

But, looking back, we’re also acutely aware of how fragile our young marriage was, and how much we had to grow up together, change together, and navigate deeply difficult times over three decades. We’ve always been honest with our kids about our journey, never wanting them to think a long-term union lasts because it’s easy. We also, for many years, harped on our kids: never marry someone from high school.

Troy and I both had serious high school sweethearts we each could’ve easily married, but time, youth, and natural evolution eroded those relationships, leading us in other directions for the better. Those experiences, and marrying someone who didn’t know us growing up, made us double down on the importance of expanding and growing beyond the people who remember your bad haircuts when you were sixteen.

As I type this, I’m so damn grateful that my son, now twenty-six, didn’t listen to a damn word we said, because last weekend, he married a woman he’d known and been friends since third grade, who he’d dated and loved since he was fourteen, and who deeply loves him. Troy and I, and our long-ago advice, were so wrong.

Our experiences with young relationships were different. They stagnated by no one’s fault, prevented growth, and festered resentment and longing for something different. But in the case of my son, he and his now-wife had a completely different journey. They each found a person who loves them just as they are, quirks and all. They’ve built a life together on their own terms, and over the years Troy and I have seen how authentic it is. Not an easy thing in the era of perfectly-cultivated-everything-social media.

The kids asked me to give a speech at their reception, and I said, in part, that there’s no single blueprint for how people meet their person. They just happened to meet theirs in a third-grade classroom when they were seated side by side alphabetically.

That year, my son drew a heart around their pictures in his yearbook.

Thankfully, I’m not always right.