Briefcase on the Kitchen Table

It seems like every day when I am scrolling through Facebook I see one or two articles written by folks in their twenties laying out all they have learned about marriage. They come often in the form of lists but sometimes in the form of stories or quotes or funny anecdotes. They also always come with a great dose of “let me bestow on the single 20-somethings of the world all of my mature married wisdom.” These articles absolutely need to stop being written because (gasp) they are condescending. I think I can sum it up best in a quote from my very first post on this blog made only two days after I myself tied the knot; I stated in that post that one thing I would not be using this blog for was disseminating marital wisdom because “I can think of few things more irritating than a newly married person trying to dispense all of her oh-so-wise-and-practiced marriage advice to rest of the world.” And there you have it.

This isn’t to say that married people in their 20s know nothing of marriage. Fate does not discriminate and I have known too many young, married couples who have been dealt more than their fair-share of obstacles. While I would describe the first three years of my own marriage as pretty blissful, they have not been without their challenges and lessons learned from those challenges. The day after our wedding we packed up our one and only vehicle and moved six hours away to St. Louis. Three days later that one and only vehicle on which we had just begun to make payments was stolen and insurance did not cover it. Only three days after that Avery started his PhD program and I started law school, not exactly lucrative or stress-free endeavors. In our wedded three-and-a-half years we have moved three times, had our sole income- Avery’s small graduate stipend- reduced by a third, and figured out everything from health insurance to student loans. We have had to to endure as Avery’s father had a stroke, as my grandmother died, as we lost a good friend and two uncles all within six months. All of these have been challenging and I learned a great deal about my husband, myself, and our marriage during all of these. Even with this, I still have no business bestowing marriage advice. And why? Because while sitting here as a 26 year-old feeling like I have lived a lot of life in truth I have not.

There is something incredibly important about the passage of time and there is no substitute for it. Leading up to my wedding I received a great deal of advice from lots of men and women and still the advice that has been the most helpful and proved to be the most true has been the advice I received from those who have had lives of 50+ years and marriages of 25 and more. There is no substitute for the passage of time and the wisdom of age, no matter how young you were when you were wed or how much life you have experienced since your wedding. With time comes distance and with distance comes perspective; from this perspective is where the real wisdom is born.

This is not to say there aren’t things young married people can write about. How about how wedding-obsessed the U.S has gotten? How being told you need a $30,000+ wedding and fairy tale nuptials kept you from having the conversations that are actually important before  your big day? How about the pressure women feel to be both sexually experienced AND virginal saints when they enter into marriage? How about how challenging it can be to balance the pressures of figuring out who you are in your 20s and be honest about that in your marriage? How about what it means to juggle in-law relationships for the first time in your life? How about trying to decide when is the right time to have a baby? Or how about writing about how your 20s are scary and come with lots of decisions and changes and while taking your spouse into consideration for all of these changes can be challenging you are incredibly lucky to have a built-in support system for all of it and the 20-somethings with the real wisdom and moxy are the folks who are going it alone and making decisions based on their gut and their heart?

A few years ago my grandmother died and it is the saddest I have ever seen my grandfather. He was a man lost in the world without his partner of decades. I watched him as he sat next to her coffin in the funeral home and lightly held her hand and I thought about all of the life they had between them, all the years they had seen together. I realized I knew nothing of marriage or sacrifice and not because I am sheltered or naive but because some things only come with time. Let’s not pretend to be wiser than we are- we are so fortunate to have so much time in front of us to share with our spouses. Don’t wish this time away by pretending like you have it all figured out- you may miss out on some great moments and great lessons because you think you already have all of the answers.