Married life so far

In the months since marriage Brian and I have settled into life together.  It’s really nice living together and not having to have one of us go home at the end of the night.  People always ask us, “How’s married life?” and to me that is such a hard question to answer.  In some ways it feels the same as dating did- only now we live together.  We still hang out and do the same things and laugh at the same jokes.  We still go to work every day and lament the fact that we still haven’t found a way to become independently wealthy so we can quit our jobs. Sometimes it just feels completely normal and like it wasn’t a huge change. 

But on the other hand there is a new sense of intimacy that we have.  It’s not just physical, although I’m sure that plays into it.  The biggest thing for me though is the combination of all the small things.  The intimacy in having someone know your humor, all of your little quirks, and someone who anticipates your wants and needs is very reassuring.  We have habits we have formed in our life together that happened without thinking.  For instance, I can climb into bed with him after a long day and know that he will allow me to heat up my cold feet on his warm legs.  Then we will fall asleep quizzing one another on world capitals.  It’s kind of quirky and that’s just one example, but there are hundreds of little things that we do that are just ours.  And that is really special to me.  We have silly dances that we do to the theme song of Friends, we say certain words in an accent to make each other laugh, and we argue over the names of our future kids on long car rides.

We’ve had a busy first few months because we got married right before the holidays.  We traveled 8 of the first 15 weekends of our marriage so that has kept us on our toes.  We read this marriage book while we were engaged that advised newlywed couples to spend a lot of time at home together during your first year so that you can form new family rhythms and not always be surrounded by other people who will determine your rhythms.  It sounded like nice advice, but in reality we enjoy the fact that we have the time to travel.  And we happen to have a lot of friends and family who aren’t in the area, so why would we turn down the opportunity to see them for the sake of sitting at home watching How I Met Your Mother on DVD?  So we decided our rhythm as a couple involves taking trips together as often as the opportunity presents itself, because we know there is only a small window in life where you can really do that. 

Overall, being married is just really nice.  I think my favorite thing about being married is not being engaged anymore.  It’s not that I didn’t enjoy our engagement, but being married is so much better.  There is no wedding stress and less outside opinions being offered to us.  I enjoyed planning our wedding but I’m glad I don’t ever have to do that again.  Although I will say our wedding was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.  My opinion of the event is quite obviously biased, but there is no better feeling than having everyone you love from all walks of your life in one room at the same time having a party.  It turned out exactly how I pictured it. 

So, those are some of my disjointed thoughts on married life so far and my attempt to update this blog J.  Hope you enjoyed.