I know, a predictable topic for Valentine’s Day. 😉 But you gotta love the classics, right?
I’m amazingly blessed when it comes to love. I found my true love in high school, got married at 18, and haven’t regretted a minute of it. In this day and age, I know that’s rare. We live in a kind of strange society where it’s accepted that teenagers are going to be sexually active, but not that they’re capable of making long-term decisions on romance. A world where they’re told to pick a career focus at age 13, but then that college students change majors on average 5 times (or something like that).
But I was never typical–I say that in all honestly, LOL. I knew from primary school onward that I wanted to be a writer. And I knew in high school that if I were smart, I’d marry someone who was happy to support me in that goal until the dough came rolling in. 😉 At that age, I had my list of what the Perfect Guy would be. He would be older than me. He would be taller than me. He would have shorter hair than me. Those were my criteria.
Then I met David. And, well…he was taller. =) Ten months younger, he had a ponytail while at that age I had a bob, but oh the dimples. The green eyes. And most of all, the soul that mine understood so perfectly. He too was atypical. More focused on life-after-high-school than most. Another rare teen who not only understood consequences but contemplated them. A guy who immediately put his total support behind my writing dream…and made it his dream too, deciding then and there that maybe he’d like to get into publishing someday.
Be still my heart!
We went to college together, from our West Virginia town to St. John’s in Annapolis. Yes, at first my parents worried that I wanted to go there just because he was leaving high school a year early to do so. But I explained that we both wanted it because it was an awesome school, and the fact that we both thought so was, you know, kinda one of those things we had in common that made us such a great couple to begin with… And after visiting the college, my parents knew it was the place for me as surely as I did.
Still, ours wasn’t the typical teenage romance. We were engaged our last year of high school. Not exactly a popular decision among teens today, but we knew what we wanted. During our first year of college, we started planning a beach wedding for that next summer. Good decision, gotta say. 😉
We got married after Freshman year. Found a ridiculously expensive postage stamp of an apartment. Finished college together, David went out and got a job with his family’s company. We decided to start a family, and afterward to move back home. And now, eleven years after those beachfront I-dos, I can say with the perspective of age that, yep, we knew what we were doing. We knew what we wanted.
Because we knew who we were.
In a lot of ways, David and I are so very different. Where I’m temperate, he’s passionate. Where I’m quiet, he’s talkative. Where I’m reserved, he’s demonstrative. Which is perfect. We balance each other out in those respects. He knows how to draw me out, and I know how to listen. And we have the same sarcastic sense of humor. The same dreams. And of course, two of the most adorable kids on the planet. 😉
Some couples have “their song,” usually something they danced to once. We have our song too–from the fabulous kids’ show Phineas and Ferb. =) Yep, we found our Evil Love. (Told you we share a sarcastic sense of humor, LOL.)
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.
LOL Love your song (and Phineas and Ferb). Blessings 🙂
Thanks, Elisabeth!
Aww … so sweet. Thanks for sharing your perspective! 🙂 Here's to many more happy Valentine's Day for you and your hubby!