Why I'm Glad I got Married In College

So, for those unmarried folks, there's this nifty little thing you have to do before getting married called getting your marriage license.  You go to the happy little county clerk office, tell them your name, age, parents' names, and a bunch of random information in order to get a paper that your officiant fills out after the ceremony and mails back to the county clerk office, who then gives you a gorgeous certificate that you need to do all the fun stuff like change your name, social security number, and get a new license.  Oh, and to change your name on things like your bank account, your insurance cards, and oh yeah, your FAFSA.

Whew. That's a lot.

It's quite fun.

When we got our Marriage License.  Note our excited faces.  It's that fun :)

So while we were picking up our license, I told them my age and the wonderful ladies responded with "Oh but you're just a baby! A child bride!" Then, when a guy in one of my classes saw my rings, he asked if I was married and when I said yes (of course) he asked if I was Mormon or Catholic. I'm still LOLing about his reaction.

No, I'm not an established adult yet. I am quite young, but that doesn't mean that I'm not mentally ready or mature enough to make this decision. Plus, the fact that the average American gets married at a much later age but the divorce rate is still so high shows that maybe age and marriage readiness are not so correlated after all.  And even if I could have a do-over, I wouldn't change a thing. Unless I could go back and marry him even sooner ;)

I've known Blake since my very first day of college. (Or wait, was it the second day? I honestly can't remember.  But if you don't know the story of how we met, you can read it Here)

And since we started dating not long after we met, he's always been my support through the stressful times, my celebration companion in the happy times, and my comforter in the scary or sad times.  But there's something about being married that just solidifies those feelings even more.

In fact, I get all sad walking to class without him there.  Especially now that it's getting cold.  I miss being able to hold his hand inside his pocket or having his arm around me to try and warm me up.  It's the little things, folks.

I'm going to admit something.  While we were dating, especially at the beginning, I was very insecure about our relationship.  I would very often worry that he would find someone he loved more than me and just be gone.  I thought every fight would be the end of things.  But now, I know he's stuck with me forever :)

Also, living with someone who has to get up and go to work makes it hard to sleep in and skip class.  I think that's why it's good that we only have one car right now- if I don't get up and decide to skip one class, that means I have to skip all my classes and work.  Which means I would be bored at home all day.  Because I'm weird, I don't really like people but I like to have my socializing time.

Also, the struggling is fun.  Sure, it may have been easier for us to wait until he was out of law school and established and we had more money instead of being poor students, but that's all part of the fun.  We get to build our wealth together.  We will have great stories of the time we ate nothing but Ramen and Jolly Ranchers to survive (Ok, that's not true. But I can't think of any good stories about a struggle right now so bear with me :)

But, the reason I'm most glad I got married in college: How many older couples are there who say they wish they had found each other earlier so they could have more time with each other? There's a very small percentage in the world who can say they met their spouses under the age of 20, and I'm one of them.  I didn't want to waste a single moment of our lives together.  And When I'm 80 and we're having our 60th Anniversary, We will look at each other and say: We couldn't have met soon enough.

Because as someone wise once said,(but don't ask me who) (Ok, actually it's Harry from When Harry Met Sally) "When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible"

This was taken the night we first decided to get married :)

And this was when we made it official :)

The Juicy Post

Well, I promised yall a juicy post, and here it is!

Orange, Apple, Tomato, Cranberry, Pomegranate!

I'm hilarious. 

But for real, it's been a crazy week.  Last Tuesday (as in the one still in October, not the one like four days ago, we decided to give Dave Willis's "Marriage Makeover" a try. (See it Here) 

We realize that at this point it's not so much a makeover for us as things we are trying to get into a habit of doing. So every night for a week, we had our hour of technology-free talking time, had intimate time, and we were mostly successful at praying together and "not being negative" every night too. 

Both of us agree that the part that we enjoyed the most was having that hour without any distractions to just talk and hang out.  No phones, no iPads, no computers, just us with our thoughts.

Our week ended on Tuesday, but we're still continuing to have our hour every night.  I think that's one thing we're going to keep doing, if it means some nights we don't get to go to sleep until 1:00.  It's so easy to give in to exhaustion after our long days of work and class, but at the same time, it's nice to use what little time we have together actually being together, instead of just existing in the same place but actually being in our little iPad or Netflix worlds.

I think a lot of couples underestimate the importance of just hanging out together.  We tend to take the attitude of "money is power" way too far, even in the bedroom.  It's always about getting something done.  But when was the last time we just stopped, sat down, put down the phones, and had a nice conversation without worrying about running late to somewhere?

The night after we finished the week-long makeover, we were so exhausted that when we got home we ate and then crashed.  And all the next day it was just sad.  I already missed that one little hour of just hanging out. So we went back to doing it the next night, no matter how exhausted we were or how much packing or homework needed to be done. Crazy how much one hour can make a huge difference!

Which brings me to my next point.  It's crucial to make time for each other.  Work and school are both very important, yes, but if we allow our extracurricular activities to take the rest of our time, are we really having successful relationships? No.

Let's not even go into how wrong "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" is.  Like, there have been studies proving the opposite. (Don't ask me what studies, I just read a side note in the Arranged Marriages study that mentioned that studies have proved it false)(Proved is one of those words that sounds super weird after saying it a couple times.. Proved, proved, proved...)

Anyway. Super short post today, I know.  But it's been a busy weekend of waking up early and moving everything..

Moral of the story, even if you have a fantastic marriage (like us) it's good to get into the habit of doing things that will help the marriage stay amazing.

Like giving little kids milk all the time so when they're old they don't have osteoporosis.

Fun thoughts :)

The Secret to Love

Hello all, it's your friendly neighborhood blogger!

So totally super exciting news! Blake and I are all set to move to our new place! Whoop whoop! We're going on Monday to officially sign the lease and then all we have to do is wait for them to finish cleaning it and we're going to do the big move!

Anyway, back to marriage and relationships and stuff.

In my Intercultural Communications class, we read a study about arranged marriages and how feelings evolve over time.

Just for some background, the participants were asked on a scale of 1-10 what their love rating was the day they got married and then on the day of the survey. (The average length of marriage was 19.4 years.) But the ratings shot up from 3.9 to 8.5! Talk about a drastic difference!

The two things that really stuck out: Commitment was deemed the most important factor in building love, and deliberateness was also found to be essential.  So basically, the people who said "I'm in this and I'm going to not only make it work, but I'm going to keep making it better" fell more in love.

The whole study was super interesting, but I feel like if I just told you all the results this would look more like a scientific/statistical blog than wholly opinion. Mixed with a little fact :)

Makes sense, right? So let's contrast that to last week's post when we discussed that communication and sex are the two most important factors. I can see how those relate.  Communicating effectively isn't always easy.  It takes effort to learn how your partner communicates and interprets different verbal and nonverbal cues.  If you're not committed and willing to work at it, it won't improve.

The study also talked about how in western culture, we believe that in order to get married, Love has to come first.  Like that super cute little songy-thing "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage!" Well, it's different in arranged marriages.  It's first comes marriage, then comes love.

Idk. We were talking about why arranged marriages aren't popular here, and that made me think of dating websites.  I mean, there are like a million of them.  Ones that boast that they use scientific tests to find your most compatible match. Having never signed up for a dating site, I can't judge whether the questions are the generic "what kind of music do you listen to" or the more important ones like "How many kids do you want to have? What religion are you?" or even "Boxers or briefs?" But I can only assume the questions are not actually scientifically based.

But then I read this study in the Huffington Post claiming that 33% of couples today meet online.  They also have lower divorce rates and higher marriage satisfaction.  Who funded this study? eHarmony. Curious.

Read report here: Huffington Post

So I wonder, why would we trust computer-generated surveys to match us with our forever partner, instead of the people who birthed and raised us?

But then again, I'm also not big into online dating.

Maybe there are some real success stories for online dating sites, but personally, I think Blake and I have a much cuter story than "oh we met on eHarmony!"

And despite the divorce statistics that have been thrown out at us, I think this one is forever <3

Have a question or suggestions? email us at: sparklinkittyblog@gmail.com!

PS- next week's post is going to be AH-MAZING. Trust me, you won't to miss it! Hear all about an experiment B and I tried for a week.. It's going to be juicy!