HAPPY

My whole life, people always told me that marriage was hard and that people really had to work at a marriage to keep it in tact. I grew up learning that marriage was all about compromise, all about sacrifice and all about equal partnership. No one ever said that marriage was easy. No one ever said that marriage brought forth amazing opportunities. No one – ever – told me marriage was fun.

Well, let me be the first to go on record and say that my marriage is easy and the most fun I have ever had. Not even running around in the biggest winter snow Middle Tennessee had ever seen while I was living there, making snowmen and even a snow lion with all the neighborhood kids, could compare to the fun associated with my marriage.

Paul and I make each other laugh like no one else can – and I remind him nearly every day that he is so lucky to have me because no one else on the planet would be able to put up with him and all of his quirks. He tells me when I am grumpy and, sometimes annoyingly, tries to immediately cheer me. He looks at me first thing in the morning and tells me that my hair is pretty…then he laughs hysterically because he is just so funny.

Instead of criticizing me, Paul has a great way of complimenting me when pointing out my faults. When I do something stupid, he tells me how well I did. When I say something stupid, he sarcastically tells me what a genius I am – and then, of course, he laughs. When I run our car through every pothole in the state of New Jersey, he tells me that my pothole-finding skills are amazing. When I write a blog post about how I should learn to swim and compete in the 2016 Olympic Games, he creates an appointment in our shared Google Calendars for the exact dates of the Rio Olympics with the caption, “Will she drown?” And, when I arrive home after a long day and say I need five minutes of touch time, stretching out on the couch with his arms wrapped around me and my head on his chest, before I begin dinner, he sets an alarm and orders me to the kitchen upon the sound of the buzzer.

I am so lucky.