SYDNEY: This is why we can’t bring our friends over.
Sometimes I miss the days when our conversations revolved around Minecraft. When one births a shiny new baby, one does not envision that child discussing your sex life over Chinese food someday. (A friend recently told her five kids they were having another baby, and her sixteen-year-old daughter sobbed, “Do you guys not know what responsible intercourse is?!” Their fifteen-year-old daughter then burst into tears and wailed, “We’re going to have to drive a church van!”)
Parent Sex: delighting teenagers worldwide. Like I always tell our kids, after this many years, just be glad your parents still have sex and like each other. And this comforts them zero percent.
You guys, brace yourselves: Brandon and I got married at twenty-one and nineteen. (College sophomore reader? I was your age. Let it sink.) I was a literal teenager who couldn’t even drink at her own wedding, not that we had any booze in the Baptist Fellowship Hall, but still. We have been married twenty-three years now; more than half my life. What we two fools were thinking marrying that young, I have no clue, because when I look at a nineteen-year-old girl now, I want to pet her hair and maybe rock her. Babies!
Allow me a few thoughts on marriage discovered the normal way: in hindsight.
First, the upside of being a child bride. We were both so young, so freshly launched in our own skin that we weren’t yet entrenched in our habits, our passions, our preferences. The main scaffolding was in place: our devotion to Jesus and crazy, mad love. With the structural elements and a few load-bearing walls in place, something happened after the wedding:
We grew up together.
Rather than navigating our twenties as two individuals blending very developed lives together, we matured as one unit, writing a new adult story with our lives. I cannot imagine where I would be today at forty-two without Brandon helping me learn who I was at twenty-three. There is no part of my adult story that doesn’t include his wisdom and balance, his perspective and discernment. There is no me without him. This is our life, every piece of it, each memory, every adult moment we built together.
As a bright reader, you’ve probably guessed there was also an underbelly to marrying so young. For instance, we banked just north of eleven thousand dollars our first year of marriage. That was our combined salary from two part-time jobs, and we suffered one of the biggest fights that year because Brandon bought chicken fingers from the Arby’s drive-thru. WE AREN’T MILLIONAIRES, BRANDON. While that seems hilarious now, financial struggles are nothing to sniff at. We slogged and sloughed our way through poverty and emerged with some bad habits, some debt, some scars. We did not surface unscathed; I still operate out of a scarcity mentality that wore a groove into my financial psyche.
More important, that early on, we simply hadn’t developed the building blocks of a happy union yet: compromise, communication finesse, selflessness, wisdom. These took time, and although we are still slowly acquiring them, we left many ugly words and regrettable decisions in our early wake. Could we have avoided them if we were older? Probably. I don’t know. Those first couple of years are hard. They just are. Maybe all the first few years are wobbly. Two selfish people joining together for life is a miracle every time.
Almost two dozen years later, the communication part is still the biggest slice of the pie, the key element that tends to make or break us. It deeply affects our general sense of security and how much sex we are or are not having. And even after all these years, it is still work. We are not yet at that stage when marriage skips along seamlessly, a lifetime of spoken words smoothing the road and receding in importance, when a pat on the hand or a glance conveys everything necessary, muscle memory from decades of communication.
Nope. We’re still climbing the mountain, trying to mix two different processing styles into one cohesive, happy marriage. It has helped immensely to prioritize self-awareness on personality traits and preferences, because although like-minded in tons of crucial ways, Brandon and I are basically processing opposites. In our early years, every conflict ended in an impasse, as we prefer two different routes toward the same conclusion:
BRANDON: What we need here is words. Lots of words. Millions of words immediately. We will speak whatever words are in our heads, however half-baked, and eventually they will lead us to the end.
ME: What we need here is to retire to our private quarters; think many, many thoughts about this internally; inwardly adjust behavior; and recover from the confrontation, then carry on with our lives.
What could go wrong?
Brandon is a verbal processor. He finds his ideas by talking them out. Rather than work stuff out in his head, he says the first sentence out loud, then continues until he reaches a resolution. Practically, this means he may say something early or midway through that doesn’t match the ending. It isn’t disingenuous; it is simply a half-formed thought that leads to a more-formed thought that leads to the conclusion. Consequently, for him talking is the only way through conflict; silence or space isn’t time to sort things out—it is simply an unresolved black hole. The speaking part is essential to his process. That is the way his mind and ideas work. It is why he used to tape his skeletal notes on the glass door and talk out his sermons in the shower on Sunday mornings. Brandon’s ideas find full formation verbally.
Likewise, his urgency and expediency is wrapped in intensity. According to him, it is proactive; according to me, aggressive. His tone is intense, posture intense, language intense, emotions intense, volume of words intense. This is not right or wrong; it is simply the way Brandon is wired. He is not a laid-back guy, which also means he gets stuff done, he works hard, he handles conflict, he is a great visionary. He is in Go Mode most of the time; his fuse is shortish but his reach is long.