I've been thinking about this idea of being together forever and what that really means. Forever is a long time, so just about anything that's going to happen forever needs to be taken fairly seriously.
My wife and I have known each other for, lemme see here, about eight years or so. Two of those years we were friends who saw each other in church and would have semi-flirtatious conversations between classes in the hallway. Another year we were dating for the first half and engaged to be wed the rest. Now, with four plus years of marriage and two and a half kids, one might think I would feel pretty established, hitting my stride, or finding a groove. Put another way, that I'm settling into this whole eternal companionship thing like a dad getting comfy in his easy chair with a good book and putting his feet up. But this is not the case.
I feel like we've barely scratched the surface. There is so much I need to understand about who my wife is and how I can be a better husband to her. I need to pay more attention to her needs. I need to be a better best friend to her, for she is a constant friend to me. I need to stop being scared and tell her how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking before it's too late and she comes to me asking, "What were you thinking?".
Beyond that, there are experiences she and I need to have together. We need to raise all these kids together and let them break our hearts and make us proud. We need to save for a rainy day and be faithful when it starts to rain and we haven't saved enough. We need to be old together. And I'd like to at least try to satiate her desire to travel together and see a bit more of this world. Here's to hoping it happens before we're serving a mission as a senior couple, although that would take care of both traveling and being old together.
That said, I can't help but think about when this whole earth-life thing is over, and I wonder how much we will reference the time we're spending together right now. She'll say something like, "Remember when we lived in that apartment where our couch didn't really fit anywhere, and you wanted to just cut off the arm rests to make it work?". And then we'll smile at each other with a perfect understanding of exactly how far we have come, how much our love for each other has grown, and that the couch with the arm rests cut off totally would have worked.
