Love and Marriage

Tomorrow is a day of excitement, a day of promise, a day of new beginnings.

I'm talking about the beginning of Spring Training for the Red Sox, of course!

Oh, and tomorrow is also Valentine's Day. In honor of that event, wifeadvice.com - a blog that I find very entertaining - is giving away a $175 getaway package to one lucky blogger who blogs about marriage or Valentine's Day. (Here's hoping that lucky blogger is me!)

As I read their post and began thinking about love and marriage, I remembered the post I wrote shortly after FavoriteBoy and I got married, entitled Mrs. FavoriteBoy. I went back and read that post, curious to remember my thoughts and feelings as a newlywed and to compare my experience of marriage then with my experience now.

If I'm honest, I probably don't have quite as many stars in my eyes about cleaning up FavoriteBoy's dirty dishes or dirty laundry anymore. But wait - I said I didn't have quite as many, and if you happened to read that starry-eyed newlywed post, you may remember that I had quite a few stars in my eyes. So I still have plenty left, and I still love to cook for my husband and clean up after my husband and see my husband smile and hear my husband laugh. I also like to call my husband "my husband" - did you notice?

FavoriteBoy still loves to make little improvements around the apartment for me, hug me five dozen times a day, eat the food I prepare for him, and make me laugh with his antics.

Things have settled into an "old married folks" routine around here, and just as we knew we would, we love it. From the first days of our marriage we both remarked on how perfectly natural it seemed to be married - it was just the picture of normalcy. And it still is - but "normalcy" sounds boring, and being married to FavoriteBoy is the opposite of boring. Instead, what happened when we got married was that "normal" got 100% more enjoyable!

I requested FavoriteBoy's input on our marriage, asking, "Are you happier now than you were when we first got married?" His reply:

"Of course. I couldn't live without you, and I wouldn't want to try." Then, as a natural continuation of his train of thought - how bad life without me around might be - he asked with pleading eyes, "Could you make me a deep-dish chocolate chip cookie in that little cast iron skillet?"