Ah, Young Love

Since our demographic tend to wed young, I clicked on this article to check out gentile experience with youthful wedded bliss. 

Katie Arnold-Ratliff speaks of her experience as a young bride. The numbers are against her; the divorce rate is pretty high amongst those who marry in their early twenties. They were a couple since high school, and roommates when they attended college. So they got married, believing in a future together.  

But in no time they were fighting.

I remember thinking that it was all so comically obvious, so dismayingly clichéd: We weren't ready . . . We'd weathered the rocky transition between adolescence and adulthood. We also loved each other, which we thought was enough to make a marriage work. It was suddenly so clear how naïve we'd been. How young we'd been. So when I moved to New York three months later—to attend graduate school at the college I'd turned down six years earlier—I had a goal in mind. I would go into the world alone and grow up, and then see if the grown-up me still loved him. If I did, I would just have to hope that the grown-up him still loved me, too.

She attended her dream college, which she had put aside due to her husband's unwillingness. She was experiencing new things and freedoms, but she missed her other half. So after a few months, she drove back to him. 

We were 24. It was all decidedly grown-up. We were decidedly grown-up. When I returned to New York a week later, he came too.

I love her description of their devotion: 

It might sound weird, but I love Adam like I love my siblings, or my parents, or the sky: I love him in a way that never entertains his absence. I'm not saying I take him for granted. I'm saying he's the bedrock of my life.