The Amazing and Wonderful Normal

     So you found a girl (or guy depending on who is reading this) and fell in love and all that jazz and now you're getting married. Yay! Let me tell you something I've discovered as a newly married man. Something I suspect most people don't talk about much. Married life is way more normal than you expect. I mean it, life goes from strange and new and exciting to normal in about three maybe four days. Don't get me wrong you'll have those shock moments when your brain suddenly realizes that you're living with another person and all that forbidden stuff is okay now, but for the most part life gets really normal really quickly. Your new life with your spouse very quickly becomes what's normal for you and let me tell you, it is amazing!

~From our first married Valentine's day. I hung it over my desk!~

     I don't in any way mean that by being normal life is boring, far from it. I've been married for nearly a year now and every single day is wonderful. No matter how exhausting work has been, or how much crap I'm dealing with, or how depressed I feel about my spiritual progress, I still come home to her. I cannot begin to describe how amazing that is. I've never been a terribly social person and having really close friends is not something I've had a huge amount of success at. Yet there is someone who looks forward to seeing me again, who misses me and whom I miss, after less than a day apart. There is so much meaning in just sitting on the couch and watching television (turning your wife into a fellow Whovian is quite fun!) that I can't even explain why it's more than that.

     Society is so obsessed with the new and exciting, the passionate and the intense, that we lose sight of the smaller better picture. Your love will transition from something strange, unknown, and even confusing into something familiar, and safe, and fantastic. Excitement doesn't die, and passion doesn't wane but that newness does. It steps aside and gives place to something infinitely better than excitement. Belonging. You belong together and to each other. 

     Again, I cannot begin to explain what that means to me. I've never belonged anywhere outside my family. I am not naturally someone who relies on or opens my heart to people. I didn't have many friends when I was young and as a consequence I tend to keep most people at arms reach because it's just so much work to make real relationships and you never can tell what people really think about you. In the back of my mind there's the very real suspicion that many of the people I know don't really think very much of me at all. Now I push that aside because I know it's baseless and just my conditioned brain being paranoid, but it's different with her. She chose me. She said yes, she said I do. She loves me. All my life I wondered if I would ever find a place where I belonged and I never really imagined it would be by someone's side. I could go on and talk about this more but really you'll just have to trust me. Work on your love and your marriage, never let it get pushed aside and you'll see what I mean. Love is best not when it's new and strange, but when it's home.

“He who finds a wife finds a good thing,

And obtains favor from the Lord.”

Proverbs 18:22