One Year Gone

                    
                  This was ONE YEAR AGO. Whaaaaa?



Wow. I cannot believe Tyler and I have been married for an entire year. It blows my mind how fast it went, but I also can't really believe how different I am now than when we tied the knot just 365 days ago. Sure, I'm really still the same person, but I've learned so much already that the unmarried me feels like forever ago. The crazy thing is, the more that I learn, the more I don't know. I'm realizing that marriage is never something you "get." There's no ultimate level to attain, like once you've reached the top you have no more to learn. You just keep changing and learning and loving as you go! In lieu of our anniversary, I decided to compile a list of things I've learned about marriage.

12 Things I've Learned in 12 Months of Marriage:
1. Marriage is so fun. Seriously, it's a slumber party with your best friend every single night. Although some nights are more slumbering than partying, it's still such a joy to begin and end each day with your favorite person in the entire world. 
2. The best way to learn a lot in a short amount of time is to travel together. You will fight, you will cry, you will laugh, and you will fall more in love.
3. Sometimes you have to compromise on bed time, especially when one person is used to staying up til 3 in the morning and the other one likes to go to bed at 10.
4. Never stop pursuing the other. When you've only been married for a year, it can still be considered the honeymoon phase, but you can't ever let dating each other become old hat. There's always fun to be had, and there's always something new to learn about the other.
5. Choose your battles. This is especially true for me, because I'm stubborn and I don't like to be wrong. But some things just aren't worth an argument or a bad mood for the rest of the day!
6. Sometimes the toughest decisions are where to eat or what movie to watch. You always want the other one to decide because you want them to get what they want. One of you has to give in or you'll never get anywhere. And if you just cannot pick a movie, it's best to create a double-elimination poker tournament bracket of movie options and pit them against each other.
7. Marriage is a magnifying glass. It can and should make the good things better, but it can also bring out the worst in you.
8. Forgive. You've made a promise for life. You're also human, which means you are going to make a lot of mistakes over the course of forever. Forgive, learn, and keep on keepin' on.
9. Ice cream makes everything better, and it can fix many problems.
10. Communicate. This obviously seems like a no-brainer, but you may be shocked at how easy it is to just keep something to yourself or bottle an emotion that needs to be expressed. You know what this leads to later? Nothing good. If he said something that upset you, the best thing to do is NOT mope around and expect him to realize what happened and come begging for forgiveness. It's best to just get it out there and talk about it.
11. Never go to bed angry. Except sometimes. When you're fighting because it's bedtime and you're tired, sometimes all you need is to sleep it off.
12. The best way to start a day is with a "snooze" worth of cuddling after the first alarm.

Here are a few other favorite tidbits from our experiences in marriage:

-Flying a kite on a windy spring day in April can really bring out the kid in you.
-Tyler will eat anything except applesauce. His dad will eat anything except cottage cheese.
-You can always say no to drugs, even in Jamaica when a guy on stilts offers you weed.
-Just because we're married, people overseas think we're a lot older than we are. Like, 30.
-I am exceptionally bad at sharing food.
-Sometimes it's ok to drive 3.5 hours to St. Louis in hopes to buy tickets to a Cardinals post-season game outside of the stadium only to not find tickets and end up watching the game at a Buffalo Wild Wings before driving back home at 2 in the morning.
-Tyler's favorite nickname for me is Dan Dan simply because he knows I hate it. His other favorite nickname for me is Little Britches.
-Cheap wine is cheap for a reason: it tastes bad.
-The quickest way to get Tyler out of bed in the morning is NOT by yanking the covers off of him.
-No one should ever waste their time with Solitaire on the computer. It only ends in frustration and despair.
-It's not necessarily a bad thing to follow a strange man into the woods at a campsite when you're in desperate need of campfire help. When that still doesn't do the trick, it is perfectly acceptable to eat your marshmallows while your hot dogs are cooking because you never know how long your fire will last.
-I know more about professional sports than I ever thought possible. And alas, I have turned into a Lakers fan.
-Scaring me is never acceptable, even in severe cases of hiccups. Even if it gets rid of them. It's just not acceptable. Ever. Tyler now knows that. 
-I think Tyler has yet to grasp the concept of "our" money, seeing as he is constantly asking how much I would give him if he did something stupid, like eat a whole tub of butter or punch a stranger ("Seriously, how much?").
-You'll never know how great of a gift a car radio is until you've driven long distances for a couple years without one.
-Tyler frequently breaks out into random song (spirituals, hymns, raps, etc. usually with his own, made-up lyrics), so much so that I'm completely immune and forget that this might sound a bit weird to someone who doesn't know us. Most of the time he's not even aware that he's doing it.
-The best cure for a headache is to turn off all the lights and pass the time by thinking of popular songs from your childhood and whispering the lyrics together.
-Tyler can make a mean creme brûlée. He claims he can't cook, but I can see past his clever disguise.

It's been a wonderful year. We had our first apartment, we graduated college, we've been to 17 different countries and three U.S. national parks together, camped, road-tripped, and backpacked, and we're about to embark on another year that includes two months at an orphanage in India, more national parks, more camping and road trips, moving to a new city, jobs, and more school. I'm so incredibly blessed to have this man in my life. He loves me more than I deserve, and I'm so thankful for the time we've had together. Here's to many more years to come!