Lindsay Detwiler

Real marriage comes long after the wedding, in the midst of actual day-to-day living. It comes on a Wednesday in front of television re-runs when no one feels like moving to actually cook dinner and that’s not a bad thing.

For four years, we laughed, cried, and trudged through the exhaustion that is college life. At the time, all we could think about was getting out and moving on. We talked about dreams and how we couldn’t wait to start life. Those four years seemed like a stopping point or like a purgatory before we could get to the real parts of life, the good parts.

We had time to focus on getting to know each other before life got too complicated. I didn’t walk into this relationship with previous notions about love or trust issues.

Even then, even at thirteen, we both recognized that whatever it was between us wasn’t something everyone had. We knew there was something once-in-a-lifetime about the way we just got each other, the way we made it work. We knew that even though we were so different in so many ways, we were the same, too.

Our romance isn’t about building a novel-worthy tale for others to gawk at. Our romance, our love story, isn’t about impressing upon others the obviousness of our love.