Young Love
One of my very first ideas as far as a collaborative writing piece on here was a compilation of a brief summary of some of my close lady friends who have all been married within the last year and who are all younger than 25. When Ryan and I had gotten engaged and married we were 20 + 21, and most people who didn't know our history and how long we'd been together would gasp, "YOURE SO YOUNG TO BE GETTING MARRIED...?!?". I can remember being as young as 16 and desiring to be a wife as soon as God would let me. It's built in me to care for someone and to have partnership and Ryan, just a handful of years later, became that for me. Marriage is beautiful but also incredibly hard at times; these ladies have shared a little bit about what that looks like for them.
HOPE CIOTTI
I got married at 23, and have been married for a little over 5 months. Nick and I met through mutual friends and dated for 13 months before he proposed. Our dating relationship was insane, in the best way. I had never been with someone so emotionally present, so spiritually encouraging, or someone so receptive and willing to communicate. I felt so incredibly safe in those 13 months, that when the time came to say yes to life with him, I jumped in with both feet, knowing life would be good.
It’s hard to condense what the first 5 months of marriage was like for me, but it certainly was not what I expected. I spent much of the first 3 months crying into a glass of red wine. I thought I knew what I was saying yes to, and all of a sudden... things changed. Nick seemed different. I thought I knew what he believed and stood for, but suddenly I was finding out he was going through a major shift, and my world was rocked. For me, spirituality touches every single aspect of my life. I had grown up in the same church for 22 years, my parents always taught the same things, I had grown up in the most spiritually stable home you can imagine. So when his direction changed, everything changed. 4 weeks into marriage I felt lonely, disconnected, scared, and trapped. Nothing was the same. What else could change? Will it be like this forever? Why did this have to happen a week after I made a vow? So I fought back. For like, 3 months. For 3 months we lived in conflict, in disconnect. He was going through some major shifts, and I was desperately picking up the pieces of the things he had let go of. All I wanted was consistency. To know what was coming next.
Nick and I eventually did have breakthroughs. Several. And I realized that if I had deemed this man trustworthy, then I have no reason to be afraid of his choices. He still adored me, still treasured me, still protected me. But I also realized the importance of actually using my influence and voice as a wife and speaking tf up. Before we get married we think we have 100% of ourselves figured out, and when we get married, we drop down to having 50% figured out, and that takes such a learning curve, no matter how connected you feel in your dating season.
I didn’t expect our first season of marriage to be a hard one. It wasn’t an unhappy season, but it was hard, and we’re still walking out of it, realizing that both of us have things to offer. I have an appreciation for this season, knowing that it gave me a much needed voice. I think Rob Bell said it best in his book The Zimzum of Love:
“There are moments in marriage when you realize that you’re brushing up against our deepest experiences of what it means to be human, when you become aware that some of the most profound truths of the universe are lying next to you in bed, moments that illuminate our most innate and mysterious longings for grace and connection and vitality. And then there are other moments, when lofty talk about two becoming one and ‘I found my other half’ seem delusional, when you wonder, ‘who is this crazy person and why in the world did I ever want to be married to them?’ Marriage.”
JENN GUIDO
Being married young is a truly beautiful experience that I am BEYOND thankful for. These last 8 months have been some of the best yet, but they haven't been without their challenges. Marriage has worked us into the ground. At times, it has pushed us to our physical and emotional limits. Our first year has been extremely trying, but in the same breath, unimaginably rewarding. We have been faced with some things that we expected in our first year of marriage, and other things have completely blindsided us. There's a lot of change that you are adjusting to in your first year of marriage, and its really important that you learn how to extend extra grace towards each other. Just learning how to do life with another person can be hard. Its full of compromise & sacrifice. But it also means having a constant source of love, grace & encouragement with me everyday. Someone to just "figure it out" with. I love that no matter what Terry & I face, whether its job changes, challenging trials or setbacks, our foundation and bond is unbreakable.
The idea of marriage sounds so intimidating. You are both working at building your own little culture that you will someday share with others and raise your own children in. And there are going to be times where you feel like you're failing completely but that is okay. Though our first year has had some hard times, it has had even more incredible ones, and we are both so thankful for it. It has allowed us to really lay the ground work for the many years to come. We are learning everyday how to communicate better, love each other better, and how to keep this all new & exciting. Daily we have the opportunity to build our dreams together, and to plan and set goals for our future, both professionally and personally. I love that we have a long life ahead of us to chase our wildest dreams. Being married young is kind of like growing up together in a sense. We're both still young twenty somethings who are very much in discovery mode. But that's why its so much fun. We each have our own little built in support systems, cheering each other on through the whole thing. We've committed to figuring this out with together, & that makes this journey so worth it.
JILL MORAN
My name is Jill. I am twenty three years old, and I have been married to Matthew Moran for ten months. A little about us is that my husband and I are known for our freespirited lifestyle; we live in freedom based on what we believe about God and we believe we have been called to freedom to live in love for the things that the Lord loves. We believe our lives are not our own, our purpose is to love and to serve. Marriage has set us up to do that as ONE, and I want to talk about how God uses such an extremely intimate thing (marriage) to mold us and shape us in ways that are much bigger than us.
Livy told me I’ve gotta make this short so I’m going really deep really fast.
To me, being married is choosing to believe that God's process to grow and teach us is just that, A PROCESS. And getting married young makes that process such a giddy adventure. Adventures are powerful learning tactics by God and can be heartwrenching at times. This is true about my marriage. But let me change course a little bit and tell you why I would choose the heartache and hard work of marriage over literally anything else in the world, and why marriage grows us to live in freedom in a deeper and more selfless way. God's truth: “I AM HIS, AND HE IS MINE”. Matt and I get to live in the reality of never being alone for the rest of our lives, and getting married young means we are starting that togetherness very early, so we can get as much of that time together as possible. We have chosen to give ourselves to someone else early on in our lives. Another person has promised to love us unconditionally and stand by us no matter what happens. Things aren't as scary anymore; my husband's presence in my life has taught me more about what God thinks of me than years of walking with God alone, and that's because God has chosen for my husband to love me like He does. I know that my husband’s love is only a small product of my God who is displaying how He feels for me. These are incredible truths that God has laced into the fabric ofmarriage. We get to grow each other in confidence by instilling how God feels towards us so we can better live in the fullness of truth about ourselves. And the more we live in that truth, the more we walk by that truth and godliness for the other’s sake.
But let me also say that all this does not come without cost. THIS PROCESS IS PAINFUL.
Being married means giving someone else your whole self. All of us sit back and think about how romantic that sentence sounds, and it is, but in all reality it's much deeper and heavier than we realize, I believe. I gave myself over to my husband, but not just the comfortable bits and pieces, not just the stuff people like about me, not just the stuff that I show to the world. When I got married I gave my husband everything. I have given him my body, my insecurities, my bad habits, my heart, my hysterical crying, my lack of dependability, my passions, my heartache it’s all his. And I almost feel as though giving all these things to him the day I said “I do.” was the easy part. The hard part is continuing to know and understand that those things no longer belong to me alone. The hard part is living in the new reality of being his. It’s having to share my heart when it's as ugly as it can get, it's talking about my insecurities and having them affect him, it's sacrificially choosing to give him my body based on BELIEVING he loves me and not on FEELING unlovable and exhausted, it’s choosing to give him “unconditional respect” because he is choosing to give me unconditional love, and not just love when I “deserve” it. Being married is giving me the willingness to push past my selfishness and let the servanthood of my calling in Jesus Christ set in, because listen here, if you are planning on putting your needs first in your marriage, it will fail.
Getting married young means choosing to be unfinished art work. The Lord hands you both a paint brush and says, “It’s all yours, paint something good.” It’s messy, you fail a lot, you grow a lot, you start over. It’s living with a focus on growth instead of a focus on performance. It’s having the opportunity by God to help Him bring our loves to their fullest potential through love and support and respect. Itmeans choosing to live with an insecure, half painted masterpiece. A painting doesn't look beautiful every step of the way, but the PROCESS is beautiful. And as you paint, you realize the crooked lines and scribbles have only made your art more dynamic, more fascinating to look at because it’s complete, and I think how the heck did we do that? And God says, “It’s My grace that made that. You, me, Matt and My grace.”
