Eight Years Married: The Love We Have Lived Into
Eight years ago, I stood across from Blake and said:
When I look out the window of my soul, you are my sun and my moon. Your existence changed my tides forever.
Eight years.
It’s strange reading my wedding vows now.
Not because they feel like they belonged to another version of me, but because somehow, after everything we have lived since that day, they feel even more true.
Maybe truer.
When I wrote them, I knew that I loved him.
I knew that he had already changed my life.
I knew that something about our relationship felt bigger than the years we had known one another. I wrote that I believed our paths had been joined before birth, that our bond had taken lifetimes to develop.
But I didn't yet know what eight years of marriage would actually ask of us.
I didn't know all of the versions of ourselves we would meet.
I didn't know the babies we would hold.
The careers we would build and rebuild.
The dreams that would change shape.
The diagnoses.
The grief.
The exhaustion.
The laughter.
The ordinary days.
The moments when one of us would need to carry a little more because the other simply couldn't.
The growing.
The unraveling.
The rebuilding.
I knew I loved him.
I didn't yet understand all the ways we would have to live into that love.
It All Started With a Beer
Blake came into the bar where I was working and sat in my section.
And, well...
Blake is Blake.
He knew what he wanted.
Our timing wasn't quite right at first, but he was persistent. Extremely persistent.
It is something I wrote about in my vows and something I still admire about him today. When Blake decides something matters to him, he doesn't casually wander toward it.
He shows up.
Eventually, our timing caught up with us.
And, walking home from a concert, he asked me to be his girlfriend.
I don't think either of us could have understood what we were saying yes to that night.
We weren't just saying yes to dating.
Somewhere inside that little moment was an entire life waiting for us.
Marriage.
Children.
Homes.
Careers.
Illness.
Healing.
Arguments.
Inside jokes.
Loss.
Dreams.
A million tiny decisions that would eventually become a family.
And if I could reach backward through time and whisper something to those two people walking home together, I think I would tell them:
You have absolutely no idea just how much life you’re about to live together.
And maybe that's the beauty of it.
He Met Me Before I Became This Version of Me
There is something sacred about being loved by someone who has witnessed you become.
Blake met me carrying a lot.
Before him, I had experienced relationships that taught me to abandon pieces of myself in order to be loved. I had lived through things I was still trying to understand. There were wounds I hadn't completely named yet, much less healed.
I didn't arrive in our relationship polished and whole.
I arrived with baggage.
And Blake didn't demand that I unpack it before he loved me.
He helped me carry it while I figured out what belonged to me, what didn't, what I was ready to put down and what would take years to release.
He saw something in me that I couldn't always see in myself.
That doesn't mean he saved me.
I think that distinction matters.
He didn't make me who I am.
But he created space where I felt safe enough to keep discovering her.
There is a line from my vows that stops me now:
Without you, this version of me would not exist and I love this version of me so deeply because of all the ways you've inspired me to grow as a woman.
Eight years later, I understand those words differently.
Because there have been so many versions of me.
Woman.
Wife.
Mother.
Teacher.
Student.
Business owner.
Creator.
Dreamer.
Woman rebuilding.
Woman grieving.
Woman beginning again.
Woman questioning everything.
Woman suddenly certain.
Woman changing her mind.
Woman coming home to herself.
And Blake has known them all.
He has watched dreams become careers and careers become new dreams.
He has watched me study and teach and build and tear things apart and build them differently.
He has watched me change.
And one of the greatest gifts he has given me is that he has never required my becoming to stop in order for him to feel secure in loving me.
He makes space for my wild.
My Shiva
I have called Blake my Shiva since the beginning.
Over the years, the meaning of that has only deepened for me.
There is an image of Shiva lying beneath Kali as she dances wildly, completely overtaken by her power.
And I have often thought:
That's Blake.
He grounds me without clipping my wings.
He's my gravity.
He doesn't stop the dance.
He gives it somewhere to land.
I can be constantly creating, questioning, dreaming, studying, reinventing, moving twenty directions at once...
and there he is.
Steady.
Sometimes looking at me like I am absolutely insane.
But there.
There is a kind of love that tries to contain you.
And then there is a love that learns the shape of your freedom and says,
Go. I'll be here.
Blake has given me that kind of love.
And I hope, in my own way, I have given it to him too.
Because marriage isn't one person orbiting the other.
It's two whole people becoming and unbecoming beside one another, over and over again.
Then We Became Parents
There is loving someone as your partner.
And then there is watching them become a parent to your children.
That changed something in me.
We created these little humans together.
Our girls.
And suddenly our love wasn't only something that existed between the two of us anymore.
It had faces.
Voices.
Tiny hands.
Shoes scattered everywhere.
Bedtimes.
Questions.
Giggles.
Big feelings.
Snacks. So many snacks.
Our relationship had created a family.
And parenthood changed us.
Of course it did.
It stretched us into places neither of us could have anticipated.
Pregnancy and postpartum changed me.
Parenthood changed him.
Sleep changed.
Priorities changed.
Our bodies changed.
Our time stopped belonging entirely to us.
Our relationship had to learn how to exist inside a house filled with needs that often felt more urgent than our own.
And somewhere in all of that, we kept finding each other.
Not always gracefully.
Not always immediately.
But we kept finding each other.
In Sickness and in Health Became Real
During my first pregnancy in 2020, Blake was diagnosed with adult-onset Type 1 diabetes at twenty-seven.
There are sentences you hear and know immediately that life has divided itself into before and after.
That was one of them.
Suddenly there were things to learn that neither of us had planned on learning.
A new reality.
A new awareness.
A new layer of responsibility and uncertainty woven into a season that was already transforming our entire lives.
When you stand at a wedding and make promises about sickness and health, you understand the words intellectually.
But you don't know yet what they will look like in your kitchen.
In your bedroom.
In the middle of the night.
During pregnancy.
While raising babies.
While trying to work.
While trying to build a life.
Marriage eventually takes those beautiful ceremonial promises and puts work clothes on them.
It asks:
Did you mean it?
And again and again, we have answered each other:
Yes.
Eight Years Hasn't Been Eight Years of Easy
I don't want to write an anniversary post that turns marriage into a highlight reel.
Because that isn't what makes me proud of us.
We've hurt each other.
We've misunderstood each other.
We've been tired.
We've carried stress into rooms where it didn't belong.
We've had seasons where life demanded so much of us individually that finding one another inside of it required effort.
We've had to learn each other again.
And again.
And again.
Because the person you marry doesn't stay the person you married.
Thank God.
We are supposed to change.
The work is learning how to stay curious enough to meet the person your partner is becoming instead of demanding that they remain recognizable.
That might be one of the biggest things marriage has taught me.
Love isn't just knowing someone.
It's continuing to want to know them.
Who are you now?
What do you need now?
What are you afraid of now?
What are you dreaming about now?
Where are you hurting?
Where are you growing?
Where have I stopped seeing you clearly?
Where do we need to repair?
Where can I love you better?
Marriage is not one enormous declaration of love made once.
It's thousands of tiny ones.
Some romantic.
Most not.
It's logistics and groceries and sick kids and schedules and money and work and dishes and checking in and apologizing and touching someone's butt while you walk past them in the kitchen.
It's building a beautiful home and then actually living inside of it.
It's watching careers evolve.
It's navigating family.
It's losing people we love.
It's becoming parents.
It's holding grief.
It's celebrating victories that no one else understands.
It's knowing someone's history so intimately that sometimes you can see the weight they're carrying before they can name it themselves.
It's repair.
It's choosing.
It's tending.
I Understand My Vows Differently Now
Eight years ago I promised Blake:
I am your biggest advocate, your truest supporter and your ultimate warrior in love. I will fight for you and I will stand by your side through anything that may come our way.
I had no idea what anything meant yet.
Now I have a better idea.
Anything is not one dramatic moment.
Anything is life.
Beautiful, brutal, mundane, breathtaking life.
And here we are.
Still choosing it.
Still choosing each other.
The vows I wrote eight years ago weren't promises to stay exactly the same.
They were promises to make room for evolution.
I promised to love him not by giving him something he didn't have, but by clearing the way for us to be free together.
I don't think I fully understood how much that sentence would come to define what I believe about marriage.
Love cannot be possession.
It cannot be shrinking.
It cannot require someone to abandon themselves to preserve the relationship.
The marriage I want is spacious enough for both of us to become more ourselves.
To have dreams that belong only to us.
To change our minds.
To fail.
To begin again.
To grow separately without growing apart.
And then to keep coming home to one another with new stories to tell.
And I Would Still Choose You
If you asked the woman standing there eight years ago whether she loved Blake, she would have told you with complete certainty:
Yes.
But she didn't know this love yet.
She knew the beginning.
She knew falling in love.
She knew anticipation.
She knew possibility.
She knew the man standing across from her.
I know the man who came after.
The husband.
The father.
The man who has held babies and held me.
The man who has faced things he never expected to face.
The man who has worked and worried and dreamed and protected and provided and evolved.
The man who has seen some of my darkest places and still reminds me of my light.
The man who has watched me reinvent myself more times than either of us can count.
The man who has made room for every version.
My partner.
My gravity.
My Shiva.
And maybe that is the strangest, most beautiful thing about an anniversary.
You get to look at the person beside you and realize:
I didn't actually know everything I was choosing when I chose you.
I couldn't have.
But knowing what I know now...
I choose you again.
Not because our marriage has been perfect.
Because it has been ours.
Lived in.
Tested.
Tender.
Complicated.
Funny.
Sacred.
Human.
Ours.
Eight years ago I ended my vows with words I could write again today without changing a thing:
This sacred commitment to you, with deep love, respect and admiration is embedded in my soul.
There is nothing I would not do for you.
Forever my Shiva, my king, my protector, my partner.
Thank you for loving me.
Thank you for existing.
Eight years married.
Eleven years of choosing each other.
An entire lifetime tucked into the space between then and now.
And somehow, it still feels like we're just getting started.
Happy anniversary, Blake.
Your existence changed my tides forever.
It still does.
I love you.
