getting married young

We have officially been engaged now for 49 days! My how those days went by quickly! Being engaged hasn't felt much different than dating, but now I get a beautiful ring on my left finger and I no longer have a boyfriend-he's my fiancé. Life's great (wedding planning, not so much).

Alex and I began dating in May of last year and started talking about marriage last November. I think I knew he was my forever guy sometime back in October, after driving away from a weekend with him and realizing I never wanted to say goodbye to him again. I think he started picking up on my subtle hints after (continuously) randomly asking him "are you going to make me your wife someday?". Ha, okay, maybe not so subtle. 

The more serious we got about talking about marriage, what we both wanted out of life, and what we envisioned our family to look like, the more nervous I got about what other people were going to think. I wasn't even 21 yet.  We had only been dating for 6 months and the entirety of our dating relationship had been spent long distance, surely we couldn't know one another yet. We're too young. We aren't financially stable. There's still so much to see and do and experience. We're too young! The more I thought about what other people would think about our decision to commit to one another so soon and so young, the colder my feet got. 

I felt as if every time I got on Facebook there was another article posted about why you should wait until your 30s to get married. And why being single is so great. And reasons not to get married young-look at the divorce statistics. Sure, they all had valid points and I understood where they were coming from. But the more I expressed my fears and concerns to Alex, the more silly I felt.

Yes, we had only been dating for 9.5 months when we got engaged. But no, we didn't think we were being naive. Alex and I know our relationship, we know one another (and will always continue to learn more about one another), and we love one another (and will always continue to learn to love one another more). We've both had to make sacrifices (and will make more sacrifices) and we've both had to learn what it means to serve someone before ourselves (and we'll always be learning what it means to serve one another). I'm not saying we've got it down or mastered it (not at all!), but through all of that we are also learning what grace means and how to give that when needed.

I never think we'll be "ready" to get married. There will always be some reason, some excuse for why we should wait: need to be older, need to be more financially secure, need to experience more, need to be independent first, etc etc etc. And we've talked through all of those. But what we've concluded is that we love one another and we are ready and willing to commit and create a covenant of marriage that will bring glory to our God. We believe God is leading us into this marriage, and we don't want to let our age (and what society says about that) to get in our way, because God doesn't necessarily work according to the timeline we create. 

Jesus loves His church so incredibly much that He allowed Himself to take on our human form and to then endure torture as He payed the price of our sin. His love for His people is unrelenting, unconditional, and unbreakable. And that is the love we are supposed to have for our spouses. That is the love Alex and I want to experience for one another. 

I know the love we have for one another is probably only comparable to the love we'll have for one another in five years, ten years, ninty years (dreaming big here). Because the love I first felt for Alex last semester can only compare to the love I have for him today. Through our relationship I have learnt what it means to be vulnerable, honest, serving, and sacrificial.  And I'm absolutely sure those lessons will continue for the rest of our relationship. But with Alex, I want to learn those things, I want to put him first, I want to love him like Christ loves the Church. 

In our relationship we laugh (like a lot. like pee-your-pants a lot...), we cry, we learn from one another, we challenge one another in our faiths, we're weird and we're goofy and so incredibly cheesy, we're adventurous, we have those hard, deep, and emotional conversations, we talk about crazy inventions we think would be cool (our cheese deodorant is going to make it big), we talk about our future family and what it will look like, we share our ugly sides, we share our struggles and our fears and our doubts and our triumphs and our successes and our accomplishments, and we pursue Christ together. Our relationship is unique and special and it's ours. 

I can't wait to marry this man and for the challenges that that will bring and for the ways we will get to experience Christ even more so. We have verbally committed ourselves to one another, and we absolutely plan on defying those divorce statistics. I love Alex, and yes, I'm going to marry him when we're still young.