One Year

“I won't give up on us
Even if the skies get rough
I'm giving you all my love
I'm still looking up”

-- Jason Mraz "I Won't Give Up"


Three years plus two months ago, I met this guy. June 9th. 6/9. Luckily this easy to remember.

Some of you know this guy. Some have heard of him, some of you have even read about him.

We dated. We fell in love. We got engaged. The usual story.

And a year ago, on July 30th, we got married. So this past month, I thought a lot about what I have learned in a year of being married. I want to be able to give good advice about what to expect as a married couple, but I don’t know if I can really do that. At least not reliably. But I have, I think, learned about my own marriage.

I quote Jason Mraz here because the first time I watched a lyric video for this song, I was in the tune -- this was my life expressed in music. Many songs are partially great because so many people can connect with them. Just another reason I love music.

I’m a wannabe rock star. I love to sing. I love to sing in cars, as my dear husband will attest to, and sing while cleaning or taking a bath. I want to play guitar and write songs and sing. But I don’t have that specific set of skills. I played flute from fifth grade through college and even wrote some music for the flute. I learned piano, but pretty much all I can play well these days are chords; I am not going to be the next Jamie Cullum. I know one chord on guitar. So luckily for me, there are tons of musicians writing songs for me to sing instead.

For part of my graduating MFA masterpiece, ahem, manuscript, there is an essay I call “Playlist.” I wrote it in part as a my own version of a love song. For a year, while we were still dating, my husband lived three and a half hours away in a small town. We split weekends every month and drove to see each other, sometimes through snow or blinding rain over several Colorado mountain passes. We spent hours on instant messenger if we weren’t on the phone. I compiled a two cd set of songs that made me think of him. It was intended as a gift for him, but for some reason, my car could play the cds and his could not. And so the gift became my own. Many songs that spoke to me on that ooey gooey level that I quite honestly did not think I had.

When he moved back to Denver, we were engaged and I thought, oh, this will be easy now. I don’t have to wait a whole week to see him anymore. I can go home from work and there he will be.

And this joy lasted about a month. I started wanting space and freedom from boxes of stuff that we had little room for in our one bedroom apartment. And pop cans to be picked up. (This is still a point of aggravation in my life.) And there was also the wedding planning. And the full-time working for me and job searching for him. And the being in the final year of my MFA program.

This is lesson one: Do not believe that you can work full-time, go to school full-time and plan a wedding. It may sound doable. How hard is it to plan a wedding, right? Wrong. If you do agree to this insanity, be prepared for crying. Lots of crying.

So the wedding happened and a year later, we have survived.


“When I look into your eyes. It's like watching the night sky. Or a beautiful sunrise. There's so much they hold.”

--- Jason Mraz “I Won’t Give Up”


Of course, no one told me this until I was already married, but the first year is apparently the hardest. The first six months we were married, I spent a lot of time at my computer or my nose stuck in a book, trying desperately to finish my manuscript and make something of the essays I had written the previous year and a half. I was also cranking out about ten more essays to finalize a collection. I was working too, and just feeling stressed about everything.

Nightmares about being late to work or being fired. Living nightmares about having a husband who had no job. Agonizing thoughts about what it would be like to have to move back in with our parents. It’s not something I would wish on anyone. I stewed on this. I felt a crushing weight on my chest at night, so heavy that I sometimes I wanted it to squish me so I wouldn’t have to feel it anymore.

I liken this to a sort of depression.

It’s that feeling where you are not where you expected to be at this point in your life -- it makes you ache. You want to be the movie star, commanding all the money that, presumably, the big movie star makes. But instead, you are still the Girl in the Mob. Your friends have to rewind and pause and rewind again and play in slow-mo just to see you.

“And just like them old stars, I see that you've come so far. To be right where you are. How old is your soul?”

-- Jason Mraz

I feel like I’m still waiting in the background, too. I want so badly for my life to move forward. I want to be speaking to the crowd instead of hiding in it. Or rather, I want to be writing to this crowd.

But at points, I have to listen to everyone who tells me to be patient. And many people tell me this, but I do not always have the imagination to see past today or this week, where I see myself in the same place. I can only think about how everything in my life will remain the same: my current job, his current unemployment, both of our frustrations with our own status quos.

And yet, this is what I have had to really learn: I must be patient, if only because I can do little to control the powers that be. I cannot give myself a new job, just like I cannot bestow a new job on my husband. I must surrender the control I want to have and practice being patient.

I am thankful that my husband seems to have infinite patience, mostly with me. I feel like it is a big deal to not nag (as much as I used to) about glasses and pop cans left all over the apartment. Then, there is my husband, who has to deal with my fits. He gives me space. He tries to tell me things I don’t want to hear when I need to hear them. He loves me. He stays.



“We had to learn how to bend without the world caving in. I had to learn what I've got, and what I'm not and who I am.”

-- Jason Mraz


I think we have learned a lot about each other. One thing I really wanted to know on our anniversary was what he had learned after a year of marriage. I told him that I had learned to not nag as much about the pop cans he leaves around (though I will admit that these occurrences have lessened) and all the other things that bug me. What did he learn? He has learned to pay more attention to the picking up of said pop cans and generally keeping the place clean.

What I think we really have learned is to try and make the other not feel like shit. This is an important lesson to have learned.

Sure, we will still both feel like shit some of the time, but improvement comes about by someone wanting to feel less shitty about life or about themselves. Someone choosing a different path.

In the end, I feel exactly like Jason Mraz in this song. Life does suck once in a while. It will probably always suck once in a while. But having someone that loves you on your side makes life suck a little less, be it friend, family or lover. Having my husband in my life does make life better.

Knowing I have been a grumpy wife for much of the last year, I wanted to give a gift with meaning. As a writer, I know words have meaning. And for a first anniversary, the traditional gift is paper. I typed up why I love my husband, cut them up and put them in a glass jar labeled “Love Jar: Reasons Why.” I hope that every time I say something out of anger or annoyance, he will think of one or several of the reasons that sit folded up in the jar.

Love and patience will get many couples through their first year. Both got us through ours. And I think both of us are stronger for it.