XIV
an anniversary post
Yesterday was the fourteenth anniversary of the day Victoria and I got married. My thought immediately following every anniversary is “good gracious, we were babies.” And it’s true - we got married young, although so were so many around us during our years at a conservative Christian college. We were engaged and married within a year of graduating.
At the time, the closest places we could legally marry were Iowa or Washington, D.C. Our little apartment in Cincinnati was equidistant from the two but my roots in the DC area and our love of cities sent us east. Truth be told, we weren’t even going to have a wedding. We planned a low-key elopement, only for the few dedicated friends we told about the engagement to all reply, “when and where”?
After so much shunning, it was a balm. Many of our friends were still in education, whether undergrad, grad, or teaching; we put the 10 of them in a Facebook message and asked them to agree on a date. The first weekend in March was the end of spring break for some, the beginning for others, and worked out well enough for everyone.
It feels a bit hypocritical of me to say that people shouldn’t get married that young, but it’s truly what I think. So many of our acquaintances’ marriages have fallen apart because they, too, were babies when they made that commitment. The difference, I think, is that we were babies who’d been through fire.
I can’t look at pictures from our wedding without also remembering listening from the other side of the wall, almost a year before that, as my girlfriend told her mother about our relationship and was met with what we knew to expect but hoped not to hear. That this was a sin in their family, that she was making Jesus sad, that this couldn’t be happening.
That was far from the only conversation in that vein, among all our family members, but it’s the one that stands out to me even more than my own talks with my parents. It’s the one when I knew we had a future together if we’d fight for it - and that she was fighting for it.
At the time, two of Victoria’s greatest fears were confrontation and her mother knowing too much about her life. But we’d been dating almost a year. I can’t express the feelings that welled up in me as I listened to her, hearing her security in the rightness of us, in the face of such opposition.
Six months later, she proposed.
Our wedding day was almost perfect, walking around DC with a handful of our closest friends (the people on the escalators behind us comprised the entirety of the invitees). People cheered and honked as we passed; marriage equality was barely a year old in the district at that point.
It was, crucially, an incredibly relaxed day. A friend came into our room that morning two hours before the photographer would arrive and was aghast that we hadn’t started getting ready. I ended up trying a few different hairstyles before giving up and asking Victoria to just do something to it.
There had been so much stress up to that point. Hiding our relationship during senior year of college; coming out to our families. Making the difficult decision not to invite our parents to the wedding to ensure we felt nothing but joy. Knowing that as soon as we crossed a state line on the way home, we’d be ‘single’ again in the eyes of the law.
That stress was the fire we’d come through. We had more ahead of us, because no relationship is smooth sailing, but we’d made it through a hell of a lot - and that gave me the certainty that we’d make it through whatever else came.
Oh, and did I mention the shoestring budget? Good thing we’ve always been thrifters.
We might have been babies, but we grew up a lot in those first few years. When you watch someone slay metaphorical dragons for you, you do whatever it takes to keep them next to you.
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
Happy anniversary!!