I Married My Best Friend

You may have noticed that there was no blog post last Saturday, and that was for good reason! I was on vacation with my husband celebrating our one year anniversary. And that got me thinking: I’ve been wanting to write a post about marriage, what it means to me, and what I believe makes them work. What better time is there to write on that subject than when I’m celebrating that very union?

Let me first state that I don’t think marriage is for everyone. It isn’t something everyone wants and shouldn’t be an expectation we have of people. Not everyone believes in marriage, and that’s totally valid. There are many reasons not to identify with a permanent legal union: you don’t believe in involving the government in your relationships, you don’t believe in spiritual unions, you don’t believe there’s only one person for you, you’re non-monogamous, you don’t like the emphasis placed on women to view marriage as the ultimate goal, you’re aromantic, and on and on the list goes. These are all valid reasons to denounce the institution of marriage and avoid it for yourself.

I myself disagree with traditional expectations in marriage, especially biblical ones, but that wasn’t enough to turn me away from it.

For me, I didn’t quite see marriage as the ultimate goal. But I did see love. If I had to claim a religion, I’d call it Love. Love is everything to me, and I find life unsatisfying and unfulfilling without it.

Naturally I was always dreaming of falling in love with a person I could spend the rest of my life with. I wanted a best friend, a go-to person, my Person.

I thought I’d found The One before in my first boyfriend, but I was mistaken. He couldn’t love me how I loved him, and I’m so thankful for that because if he had loved me even a little we’d still be together and I’d have never had the chance to truly know my husband.

My husband is my world. Maybe to you that sounds unwise. Maybe it is. But this is my truth, and I don’t want it any other way.

It’s scary to love someone this hard and intensely. It means you have everything to lose. But that risk has a flip side: a lifetime of moments shared with your best friend, your soul mate.

I don’t believe that there’s only one person your soul can connect with so intimately that they become your life partner. But I do believe that finding that connection, and noticing it to be able to nourish it into something spectacular, is rare. So when you find someone your soul can mate with, you fight like hell to keep that knot tied.

So, I tied the knot. This man is my team mate. We do life better together. We are each other’s shelter and strength and guidance. This man is my family. He should be the one to make legal and medical decisions on my behalf if I’m unable. He knows me more than anyone and can get me what I’d want. So we made our established union as a family legitimate in the eyes of the law.

All of this is to say: if you do marry, I recommend marrying your best friend. Marry someone that you can see as the perfect teammate and you can always choose to love. Falling in love comes and goes, but your Person will always choose you and love you in the way you need.