13 Years!

Today is a lot of things -- Martin Luther King Jr Day, a day where we FINALLY have boatloads of snow, a day off from work, but also...our 13th Engage-o-versary. 

Thirteen years ago today I was home, planning a romantic dinner for when Bryce got home and nervously plotting my proposal. It was a letter, carefully crafted and typed in a file called "merrime." It was a persuasive essay of sorts on why we should get married. 

It's so strange to look back on a time when I felt I had to convince Bryce to get married, but it existed. He was burnt from a first marriage and was like, "let's just live together, why do we have to get married?" While I know people who made the choice to have a life partnership and never get married, and have been together for more than 20 years, that isn't what I wanted. I'm not sure if I wanted the chance to do marriage again the right way, or if the idea of a legal partnership was somehow romantic, or if I'm just so much a rule-follower that I needed the traditional route if we were going to try to have children, but I wrote a whole page on why marriage was a good choice and we should do it and then let the nerves take over while I waited for him to read it to the end. 

Spoiler alert: he said yes. 

I'm proud of a lot of things, but our marriage is definitely towards the top of the list. I love our partnership, our relationship, the way we've grown together through so much. The way we support each other and enjoy each other's company, something that could be seriously tested in a global pandemic where there is a LOT of togetherness time! We respect each others' need for quiet alone time as much as the need for time together, snuggled on the couch. We've devised a sort of playbook that includes things like "We can't both be crazy at the same time, someone's got to dial it back and be the calm one," and "Just make food for Jess when she is insanely crotchety, because she's hungry but will likely bite you if you ask her" and one I stole from Brene Brown about the lie of 50-50 -- "when someone is overwhelmed, take on more of the household responsibilities and shift the split, because it always evens out eventually." 

I am so grateful for our life together, probably more so because we are a family of two (plus cats). 

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