Three Years, Three Things

Ben and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary on June 15. YAY.  For this year's anniversary post, we each answered a set of questions, a few that came from outside sources, about our relationship.  This post is a long one, so feel free to skip to the end and watch a clip from one of Ben's and my favorite movies and our favorite filmmaker.  ***You'll also be able to hear the song we danced our first dance to playing in the background LOL***

Three favorite things about being married:
Jewel: I love the feelings of safety and security in a relationship that come with marriage.  And I like how I can say whatever I want to Ben and he's not judgmental. That might just be unique to Ben, but I do think there should be open lines of communication in every marriage.

Ben: It's such a comfort knowing you can come home and someone is going to listen to you gripe about work or ask you if everything is OK and generally BE THERE.  Jewel is so tied into the DNA of my life now that if I have to spend a few days away from her I pretty much forget how to function like a respectable member of society.  Two other great things about being married have to be the financial security and the division of labor.  I might never cook again.

ANNIVERSARY WEEKEND 2016

Second is the Best

I woke up this morning feeling just so, so lucky and blessed.  I've had a couple of days and months when I've felt like I've just been dealt a bad hand of life.  But when I really think about it, that's not true for me at all.  Not one bit.  Ten years ago (plus about a week and a half) Ben and I agreed to become boyfriend and girlfriend.  And for ten years we've never broken up or said we didn't want to be with each other anymore.  I feel like that's a true blessing.  Because if you look at that time frame, we went through college and post-college together.  Those are some craaaazzzy years.  

Just Shy of One Year Married

So I had a really long post written about the one thing I learned at the end of one-year of marriage.  It was really long and really corny and really boring. I thought that it was what I wanted to write to sum up my first year of marriage.  But the post wasn't a true reflection of how I really feel about this first year.  So I deleted the whole thing.  I think it was like 600 words and it took me several days to write.  
But this is what I really think about our first year:

June 15, 2013

  The first year of our marriage was easy.  I'd say it was the easiest and best of Ben's and my 9 years together.  And I don't say this to downplay any other couple's experience with their first year of marriage. We've heard countless times how hard the first year of marriage can be.  So we expected the worst.  But we've been blessed.  We know we have hard times coming, but we're happy that we've avoided them thus far.  During this incredibly easy year I've discovered most of all that Ben and I were made for this.  We were made to be married to each other.  Getting married was kind of like the missing link in our lives, so once it all went down, everything else just started falling into place.  Someone at a bar jokingly asked me if I missed being single.  I non-jokingly replied, nope.  Not one bit.  I know that this is where I'm meant to be-- being Ben's wife and creating a life together.  

Trip to Arizona, August 2013

We get a real kick out of referring to ourselves as the Ashman family.  It's just the two of us plus our cat, which I guess in some people's mind isn't a family because there aren't any kids.  But we think of ourselves as more than a couple, more than two people in a relationship.  We're relatives! We have to write each others' names on forms and paperwork. We get mail that's addressed to both of us.  We have savings accounts, dammit!   And we know that not having kids to raise right now, doesn't make us any less of a unit. 

Christmas 2013

We still have disagreements.  Just because our first year of marriage was awesome and easy compared to some of our previous years of dating does not mean we didn't have any fights/arguments/yelling matches this year.  For me, the big difference between fighting pre-marriage and fighting now is that I don't start coming up with to ways to get out of my relationship because we're much more than that.  Ben is just like my sister, mom and dad. We can't stay mad at each other for long.  Just like with my siblings, we may get into a heated argument, but at the end of the day we are a family.  Nowadays, we apologize quicker, we forgive easier, we resolve things a hell of a lot faster, and we keep it moving because we know that we're all we've got. We're bound to one another.  

Death Valley, Calif., February 2014

  I love Ben so much more than last June 15 or any day really.  We've been together for almost a decade so you'd think, how much more can you love a person or learn about a person.  When you've been dating someone for so long, it's easy to get caught up in wishing for that "new love." That infatuation that was present when we first started dating.  One thing I've noticed this year:  I have no desire to go back to the newness of love.  I love where we are right now.  And I think I'm MORE obsessed and infatuated with Ben now than I was during our first year of dating.  It's kind of bad actually.  I'm pretty sure I have a problem.  

Pre-Greece with Grayson, May 2014

  SO, in sum, being married, it's pretty great.  I think I'll keep doing it.

Us Before "$5 Movie Night," June 10, 2014