Being age 25 in 2010 makes my peers experts on dating.  Me, not so much.  If I’m an expert at anything relationship-related, it’s marriage, and even there, I’m more “intensely familiar” with the institution than the “Dear Abby” of the wedded masses.

When I was 19, I married my high school sweetheart.  Bad idea, but one that represented my desire to meet that real, solid someone with whom I could share my life.  The marriage lasted 11 months, and we parted on fairly good terms.  He had problems, and as is the case in most failed unions, I did too. With the ink still wet on our divorce papers, I dated a man ten years my senior, a non-committal type who caused me (or rather, allowed me to cause myself) a great deal of angst.  After a year of that, I was exhausted, fed up, and in that empowered space we women find when we hit rock bottom: the “I’m doing my own thing alone and you all can take a hike!” space that lights up our insides and motivates our outsides. It was at that moment that I met my future husband.  We moved in together while still in college and wed a year later.  I was a tender 22, and he 23.

Marriage ain’t no picnic, but I say, who wants to picnic all day, every day, anyway? What has brought us through the melding of personalities, financial challenges, and all the daily stuff is the driving partnership between us. I won’t lie and say that both of us haven’t wondered what the hell we were doing when we decided to forsake all others barely out of our teens (although two generations ago that was the norm).  The answer is apparent when we make each other laugh, when we produce and perform in our monthly burlesque show, and that I know he’d tell me exactly what I don’t want to hear before he’d lie to me. We’ve grown up together, embarked on this thing called adulthood hand in hand, and now that my head is on straighter than ever, that matters.  That’s true love.

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