Wedded Bliss

How could I start a blog named "Wedded Bliss and Other Stories" without having a first post called Wedded Bliss? My inspiration comes from the fact that I celebrated my 1 year wedding anniversary on Saturday by being a part of my dear friend Jenna's wedding. I have had a few people say, "Well, that's too bad that you had to spend your first anniversary at someone else's wedding." My response is that I loved it! What better way to celebrate than to see a good friend enter into the same covenant that the hubs and I entered into one year ago? Plus, it gave me a really good excuse to plan a mini vacation to Indianapolis and to throw in a few trips to fabulous restaurants on which we would not usually splurge.

This past year with the hubs has been the best year of my life. It has been difficult in so many ways (we are both students - he is in medical school and I am in graduate school), however it has been so much easier because we've been able to go through it together.

I don't mean to sugar coat things - we sometimes have fights or disagreements, but we are willing to compromise and ultimately have a desire to make each other happy. A marriage cannot work unless the other person is your first priority (yes, you have to put them before yourself). But the great thing is that I love him so much that this comes naturally (sometimes more or less naturally than other times).

I was reminded of something a few nights ago when I was at Jenna's shower. She asked for advice on marriage and while I didn't have advice per se I had an anecdote. Our pastor took us out to lunch a couple of months after we got married. He said that one of his favorite things about seeing newlyweds is finding out about the things that they are learning about each other in their new lives together. He asked me what I had learned about Keith. It took me a couple of days to think about this and to come up with a really good answer, but I shot our pastor an email a couple of days later with my answer. The hubs and I have extremely different opinions about the number of hangers one should own. I am of the firm belief that you should have about 15 extra hangers laying around. Then, even if you don't clean all of the hangers out of your closet you still won't run out when you are in the laundry room hanging up clothes fresh from the dryer. Also, if you go shopping and happen to buy a few new outfits, you already have the hangers at home to handle it. The hubs is of the opinion that you should own the same number of hangers as you own clothes. When I have "just enough" hangers, I get to the last 3 things in the dryer, can't find a hanger because they are located somewhere in the jungle of my closet, and then the clothes wrinkle by the time I give up on finding the hangers and just lay the clothes flat on the top of the washer and dryer until I wear 3 new items of clothing thus freeing up 3 new hangers. Of course, he is more organized than me and is prepared before he cleans out the dryer by going around to every closet and looking between every single piece of clothing to see which hangers are empty. He also has a theory that at any time, some clothes will be dirty or un-ironed so we could actually make due with less hangers than clothes. Sometimes I do all of the laundry and ironing in one day just to spite him.

The hubs and I compromised. He agreed that we could have more hangers (and since we bought more there has not been a single occasion during which all of our clothes have been washed - he probably made a good point when he said that there will always be some clothes in the laundry or ironing pile) as long as I agreed to load the dishwasher in his preferred way. Now, instead of loading all of the silverware handle-up, I load the forks handle-up and the spoons handle-down. The hubs is convinced that they get cleaner this way. I am convinced that even if they get cleaner in the washer that it is dirtier in the end because you are inevitably going to grab the spoon on the part you eat off of when you unload the dishwasher (be forwarned if you plan to dine at our house in the future).

I think that this can all be summed up nicely by something that I found on Jenna and her new husband Johnny's wedding website. They had a fun poll that you could take about their future lives together. One question was, "Will Johnny and Jenna kill each other living in a one-bedroom apartment?" The answer: "No. Because Jenna will make the bed (even though she doesn't care) to make Johnny happy."