20 years - wow

20 years ago on our wedding program we had the phrase

Today I will marry my friend...

the one I laugh with,

 live for,

 dream with,

 love"

and 20 years later not much has changed in that regard. In so many others everything has changed. In our 20 years of marriage we have been through many hard times, more than your normal couple and some we wished no one ever had to face. The road hasn't always been easy but the one thing we have done is work - bloody hard work at times but we have worked on our marriage.

I remember them teaching us in our pre-marriage classes that love is a choice. That it's not a choice you make only once but that you make that choice daily, you decide daily that you love your spouse and want to be with them. In the shining eyes of a 19 year old I didn't really understand it and felt in was a nonsensical idea... Now I understand perfectly what they mean.

I'm not out to pick on anyone else's decisions, I can only speak from my experience and mine has taught me that to continue choosing love you have to work hard at it. The 19 year old wouldn't have wanted to know that, love was just roses, passion and sunshine. I even thought that if you had to work at it then it wasn't worth having. :) I can shake my head now and think silly girl. I guess the reality was we both just had to grow up and in growing we learnt to weather the storms together.

I am a romantic at heart and do believe in soul mates. What I didn't know before was that finding that person that you knew was the one didn't mean there would be no angst, no disagreements and that at times it would be hard to choose to love them.

I have to say whether it sounds conceited or not, I'm proud of us. I am proud to have been married 20 years. Proud that we have worked through the obstacles that a young marriage brings, through the tough times that an unwell spouse adds pressure to a marriage, through having a baby at a relatively young age under frightening circumstances. I am proud that we continue to work through losing Grace and having our dreams taken from us. I am proud of us. 

I look at our wedding photos and videos and think that couple were so innocent, so young, so in love and so innocent. How very lucky were we to have had that.

We're not perfect, far from it. We still have tiffs, share different views but we are continually growing and learning from each other and maybe that's what makes it work for us.

I love my husband with all my heart and look forward to the next 20 years xx