Before Jason and I were married, we didn't fight. We had a few misunderstandings, but we never fought, we never broke up, and we never really had to say "I'm sorry" to each other for things that we did to each other. Granted, we were only together for eight months before we got married, and we have had plenty of opportunities to learn about apologizing in the years since, but our courtship was kind and happy. By the time we met each other we had both been in enough other relationships before (a concept that is foreign and wrong by our kids understanding) to know how to fight fair, how to fight ugly, and when to get out of relationship because it was heading down the wrong path. But we still had a few moments of misunderstanding that stick out in my memory 13 years later.
The first was just a few weeks after we started dating. There is a curfew at BYU that mandates that students be back in their apartments at a certain hour, and we were cutting it close every night... I'm not sure that the curfew even enforced by anyone but your honor, and heaven knows we both (along with everyone at BYU) broke it more than once. One night in particular we were sitting on a blanket at a park (the same park where I later surprised Jason with a candlelight dinner and where even later we would walk to play with Leah and even later with baby Adam) and it was getting late. I was getting tired and it was surely past curfew and we weren't really doing anything, just talking and being together and trying to get to know each other as much as we possibly could. We wanted to be together all the time, and at least one of us (Jason, bless his sweet heart) had the grades to show for it that semester.
(the stick in the nose picture park)
Side note- one of the ways that Jason and I knew we were meant for each other is that we both felt so incredibly lucky to have the other person in our life. I couldn't believe that someone as smart and kind and thoughtful and handsome and spiritual and good as Jason wanted to be with me (he was a real diamond in the rough, I tell ya!), and he couldn't believe that someone like me (cute, friendly, popular, charming... I should really let him fill in the blanks here...) wanted to be with him. We both felt like we had hit the jackpot, and that was a really good indicator that we weren't going to take each other for granted or leave anytime soon. Boy, as real adults now we see so many marriages that end because one person decides that they are far too good for the person that they chose to marry however many years ago.
(the candlelight birthday dinner in the park)
So we're sitting in this park under these huge evergreens and I was getting tired and thinking how we really needed to be more sensible and get home and rested so we could fulfill our responsibilities in life even though we just wanted to be together all the time and I said, "What are we really doing here?"
As in here, at the park, on the blanket in the late hours of the night.
And Jason thought I meant "here" as in here in our relationship, talking about the future and marriage and moving so fast and maybe we should just put the breaks on things, buddy.
So he said, in his typical Jason way of kindness and avoiding confrontation, "Oh, I'm sorry. Let me get you home." And he gathered up the gray and black alpaca blanket from Bolivia that he kept in his car and we took the five minute drive back to our apartment and parted ways, me thinking nothing of it and thrilled to be heading home to get some sleep and he thinking that maybe we were going to break up because really, what
were we doing here?
The next day I got home from campus to find the most beautiful arrangement of roses in my room, along with a picture frame of some of the pictures that we had taken together so far and I realized that maybe the way the previous evening ended was a bigger deal to Jason than it had been to me, and boy did I like the way he was trying to smooth things over!
So I called him (we had cell phones back then, but certainly no texting on either of our phone plans) and gleefully thanked him and once we figured out the misunderstanding we went right on our way being completely smitten by each other.
Such a small miscommunication. But a good indicator of how carefully we wanted to care for our relationship right from the beginning.
Another side note- because there was no texting back then, it wasn't unusual to go hours or at least part of a day without talking to each other. When we said goodnight at the end of a date that was it until we saw each other again the next day. Nowadays I can't even imagine how often you have to text or tag or tweet your love to someone, but back then we were still able to carry on our daily responsibilities of work and school and getting sleep at night and getting ready in the morning without staying connected to each other through it all. That probably explains why Jason and I stink at texting and talking on the phone even now. Our courtship happened face-to-face, not screen-to-screen. Good grief, are we old-fashioned or what?
I do remember making him a candy bar letter not too long after that, professing my love to him by the way of "Hot Tamales" and "Big Hunk" and such. My notes on the back of that picture tell me that I made it for him because I was going on an overnight trip to Park City with my sisters, and that it was the weekend that Jason asked my dad's permission to marry me (a conversation that they had in his office while he (Dad) was wielding around a plastic sword. Grandpa likes to talk with his hands.)
Another time we had a moment of hurt feelings during math class. Jason and I were both volunteer student mentors at the local low-income elementary school, and we happened to be there at the same time one week. Jason and his student were flying through the math assignment, while my student and I were struggling to understand the concept behind the problems. When Jason challenged my student to a math race against his student, I was left frustrated and embarrassed for my student. These two little boys weren't on the same level in math- they shouldn't have been racing to solve problems that were simple to one and a real struggle for the other. We got through class, but on the way out to the car Jason got a good earful about what I thought about his unfair actions and how he'd better not put our future children on the spot like that if they were ever to struggle with something they were learning. He had had no idea that it was an embarrassing moment for me, asked my forgiveness and we moved on from it, but it was a teaching moment for both of us in sensitivity and kindness- both to each other and to the children in our lives.
For the majority of our wedding planning, we didn't have any disagreements. We just wanted to be married, not really plan a wedding, but there was one big task that had been left undone by his side of the family that really needed to be taken care of. That was probably the first time we were genuinely frustrated with each other- merging two families and learning all of their traditions and expectations and ways of doing things is no small task, and there was definitely a tense moment or two in wedding planning. But again, we weren't too consumed with wedding planning- there was no Pinterest back then giving me over-the-top advice on how to create the wedding of the century- we just wanted to have a lovely wedding day and then get on with the business of being married!
After we were married, we had one moment of frustration on our honeymoon and our first fight within the first week of getting home. On our honeymoon we had a week alone to talk about everything, including our finances. Again, no posting pics of our fabulous hotel room or texting our family or friends about our adventures while we were gone. It was just us, learning how to be Mr. and Mrs. What a once-in-a-lifetime experience! Who would want to invite our social network to join us? (Apparently I would stink at courtship and marriage in the social media age.) As we had these many joining-our-lives conversations, we learned that one of us had our finances mostly in control, and one of us had our finances mostly out of control, and we were now faced with what felt like a really huge task of merging everything together. I'll just say that one of us was much more comfortable with accumulating consumer debt than the other one of us was. Boy, those years of college and early adulthood sure did teach us a lot of things that our parents probably tried to tell us but we refused to listen to and had to figure out by doing a lot of things wrong first to really understand.
Sigh.
So on our honeymoon we deposited a wedding check into one of our accounts and discovered that overdraft fees that were waiting to be paid in that account ate up almost the entire amount of the check. It couldn't have been more than $50, but still! It hurt! And we realized that our finances were going to need some serious and immediate rehabilitation once we got home. That was a conversation in the parking lot of Wells Fargo that I will never forget.
Once we got home we set ourselves to the task of setting up house- such a fun thing to do! Especially when you live in a 400 square foot apartment with yellow countertops and brown carpet and a total of two closets in the whole place. We wanted a challenge! We chose to live in the cheapest livable place we could find for as long as we could. Our bedroom closet was smaller than the closet we had each had in our singles apartment complex, plus there was a coat closet in the "hallway". We each had plenty of clothes and stuff to stuff into them, and we had to figure out what was really important to each of us and what could be discarded from our first place. There just wasn't a whole lot of room to put anything, and our first fight as a married couple was over closet space- who got what (I wanted more than my fair share) and what had to go (Jason's dart gun, shot gun, and eventually the weight set, as well as my orange suede trench coat and about half of my shoe collection) and where we were going to stuff all of our stuff now that it was
our stuff - bicycles, snowboard, sewing machine... it all had to go somewhere! There was a bit of adjusting that came with merging all the things together, but that was a fun kind of fight to have. Especially since we were now living together- all the stuff could go for all we really cared! We just wanted to be together!
Artwork sent to him on his mission- take a picture and toss it!
Bikes- keep! Stored on the sides of our beds in winter, chained to the building in summer.
So right from the beginning, we chose to fight fair. No name-calling, cutting words, or silent treatment. That's not to say that we've never done that since, but we started off on a pretty good foot. I'm certainly the more excitable and passionate one in our relationship, and Jason is more of the anti-confrontation peacemaker. I'm glad to say that he's mellowed me out quite a bit as the years have gone by. It helps that he doesn't often rise to the situation when I try to bait him with an argument, and boy it would be hard to imagine how we would handle the "real" fights in the years since if we hadn't got it right back then.
And as the years have gone by we've learned how to make up properly too. There is nothing worse than hearing this pathetic exchange- "....I'm sorry....".... "...It's okay...."- because it's probably not really okay! If something was worth getting upset over and worth making up over, it probably wasn't okay and something probably needs to change.
We try to apologize sincerely. We say to each other, and we've taught our kids, that apologizing means making things right, and sometimes that requires that we make ourselves vulnerable to the person that we have hurt. In our family we say,
"I'm sorry. Will you forgive me?" Those magic words are so empowering! That question gives the other person the power to say, "Yes! I will forgive you." I hear my kids say it all the time, and I love watching the physical relief that washes over both of them as they offer or receive the forgiveness that they are seeking. As adults, it takes a good bit of humility to say those words, but we are in relationships that we want to keep healthy, so no ignoring the problems in hopes that they will go away, no sweeping issues under the rug, and no expecting the other person to read our mind and figure out what needs to be fixed. Sometimes that means that we have to have hard conversations. Sometimes we have moments (or hours or days) when we step away from the frustration to figure things out, but we always step back in to make things right again. And that is a habit that we started out back in that first night when I asked, "What are we doing here?" We talk and get things figured out so we can move forward.
Auntie Allison asked me recently if forgiveness has to require a grand romantic gesture along with it, and my response was No! It's more important that forgiveness includes humility and sincerity than that it is accompanied with flowers and chocolates (although that never hurts either). Fighting is a real part of relationships that are worth keeping. And in our marriage, we've learned that it's worth it to figure out how to fight fair.
