I heard it frequently when we got married: “Enjoy this, because it’ll be over soon.”
And I kept wondering what the “it” was – the magic that surrounds a new marriage? The romantic gestures that Cody has performed since we started dating? The hope of looking forward to an exceptional future together?
Over time, I deduced that these people were talking about the primal, almost naive instincts of young love.
You know what it is: when your butterflies keep you from creating a coherent sentence, or you count down the hours until you get to be with your person again.
Cody and I were already in a serious relationship when I was 17, so the combination of my still-developing brain and teenage hormones made it quite interesting to explore a maturing partnership while navigating how to stay up late to get in as much Skype time as possible.
It was a very fatalistic perspective they suggested, and I’m not one for throwing in the towel so soon.
After this week, I’m firm in my stance that the “honeymoon” stage of your relationship can certainly come back. You just need to change things up.
Cody and I agreed that we’d switch every-other-year between staying in Chicago and traveling to Arkansas for the Thanksgiving holidays.
The first year we were married, we spent Thanksgiving in Chicago, so we decided to take a little road-trip to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, for a free one-night stay using a Hotel.com promotion. Long story short, it was just the get-away we didn’t know we needed. We spent hours in the pool and hot tub, reading and chatting between chapters about what our future could look like. It was actually during this conversation that I became serious about being a novelist. We had a beautiful dinner at the Baker House. We walked along the lake. The hotel we stayed in was loosely occupied. It was wonderful. We didn’t have to spend lots of money, and the experience was one we’ll never forget.
This year, we decided to do something similar. I had many gift cards for restaurants and a voucher for a one-night stay at a downtown hotel, so I booked our room that Monday and we hopped on the train that Friday afternoon.
We knew we had a 9pm dinner reservation that night, so we needed something to hold us over in the meantime. We bought fast-food chicken, walked along the river until we found a place we could picnic (it wasn’t cold compared to what it could be at this time of year!), had fun acting fancy with fluffy robes and super-downy beds, swimming, and watching a movie all before dinner at Nacional 27.
We danced and laughed so much that, by the next morning, I found I couldn’t look him in the eye. I felt nervous. At one point in between bites at breakfast (also covered by the hotel voucher – score!), Cody asked me what I was thinking. I struggled for an answer, so I shrugged. My intelligent brain was mush, finding its roots in the memories of 17 year-old Ania. How could I articulate that this, right here, was the most sophisticated we had gotten all weekend and I wanted to do was go back to our room and joke about things only we laugh at in our stupidly fluffy robes. I couldn’t, so I just smiled and said, “This is really nice.”
So when people say things like your marriage will never be as sweet and fun as it is right now, they’re wrong.
Love is as sweet and spontaneous and wonderful as you make it. To be anything less is to be missing out, big time. Make time to be young kids again. I promise it’s worth it.