Words on marriage

This is super long.... no one might read it but that's ok haha

Our 2-year wedding anniversary is coming up on the 26th of this month.

It's exciting, and it's unbelievable that it's been two years. And just thinking about the past two years is very interesting.

They say the first year of marriage is the hardest. I never believed this, and for me, I don't know, I thought the first year was great. I was happy. Things were good. But now when I think back on it, well, at least the first five or six months after October 26, 2002..... I can't believe we survived, hehe.

1 month after our wedding we had a flood in the apartment, in the middle of the night. A pipe burst in the wall due to the landlord's complete disregard to his responsibilities ... and it was horrible, everything got wet, it smelled in there like mold FOREVER.... ugh it was just horrible.

I was out of work. This was kinda nice cos I used to walk to the library down the road and I would spend my days reading books, cleaning and cooking. I remember I wrote a lot in those months, and I wanted to start the photography business back then but... i had NO start-up money whatsoever so it was impossible.

We only had one car. We only had one cellphone. We didn't have TV or the internet. Oh and not to mention we had to pay for our own wedding so we had bills GALORE.

We were totaly broke, and like I think 3 people were getting married and I was in the weddings and I had NO MONEY for anything to do with the weddings, and it was horrible.

Then my temp agency finally called me back with a job - the catch - it was in Toms River - Chris worked in Atlantic City at the time - and we only had one car. For a couple days he had to take the bus to AC. WOW. I can't even imagine how horrible that was. The characters that come off buses here are just... um.. characters.

The job I got in Toms River - was just HORRIBLE - the worst job I've ever had. I was the receptionist at a SUPER busy doctor's office and it was just horrible. I'm not good on the phone as it is, but 80 calls a minute on 12 different lines coming in oh man ... TERRIBLE... and the phone never stopped ringing, ugh. It was a horrible experience. (thank goodness I only worked there about 2-3 weeks and then I got my job here! And we got to commute together for a while, which was great :) )

We almost had to move back in with my parents... because things were really rough.

OH and not to mention - I lived on my own for almost 3 years before getting married. Suddenly getting used to someone living with me, and um, doing all the bills and kinda controlling all the money and stuff, was very hard to get used to. It took a lot for me to accept that well, I can't really just go and do something that costs money haha.. i had to check with someone first. This was SOOO hard to get used to.

We just kept praying about everything, and keeping Jehovah first. We tried to just keep up with our bills and all that stuff and refused to give up.

The weird thing is that despite all of this, we were happy. I was out of work for a while so I always had a nice dinner on the table when Chris got home from work. The apartment was always super-clean.

Things are a lot different now, I mean I guess financially we're doing a little better, we both have jobs so we're not so broke, we live in a nicer apartment where pipes in the walls are less likely to break... we actually have two working cars haha... the second year was definitely "easier" in that way. And more intersting I guess, we found out a lot more deeper things about each other, some good some bad, and it's just .. interesting. We're best friends. :)

.. but yeah, we're both a lot busier now, the apartment doesn't get cleaned as much or as well as the old one used to, and I don't always have a great full dinner on the table... sometimes we spend too much time watching TV, hehe... and we both wish we WEREN'T working fulltime. We're still happy together of course, and we're still learning a lot about each other and dealing with each other's faults and all that stuff, but it's still good, and it's still fun. We both know we made the right decision when we got engaged and decided to get married. We fit. We work well together, I guess we had to learn early on how to work through rough situations.

I get a weird feeling when I think back to those days, those first few months when we had NOTHING.. it gives me a weird feeling, almost like a nostalgia but.. colder. It was scary. It's weird, because I can't believe we actually lived through that. I firmly believe that if it wasn't for the fact that we relied on Jehovah and followed his guidelines for marriage and life in general, we wouldn't have survived.