We weren’t “ready” for marriage. We hadn’t tried it out. According to conventional wisdom, we were “unprepared.” We didn’t take a turn in the Marriage Simulator. We didn’t live together for seven years and slowly glide into it. We were two, apart, only dating — courting, really — until we were one. We were unmarried, and then we were married. No transition. No warm up.

I met my wife on eHarmony. I was a morning rock DJ in Delaware, she was living in Maryland and finishing up her degree. I drove two and a half hours to pick her up for our first date. I spent most of my bi-weekly paycheck on tickets to a dinner theater in Baltimore. The rest went to gas and tolls.

And that’s the way it would go for the next year and a half (minus the dinner theater part). Once a week, I’d spend money I didn’t have and drive the 260 mile roundtrip to see the love of my life. Sometimes I’d sleep for a few hours in the guest room at her mom’s house, waking up at 2AM to head back to the coast for my 5:30AM radio show.

I was very tired back then.

And broke.

Lord, was I broke.

She’d take turns driving my way, burning gas she couldn’t afford to burn and using money that should have been collecting interest in a savings account. On occasion, we’d cut ourselves (and our cars) a break, meeting in the middle for an intimate meal at the Cracker Barrel near the Bay Bridge. It was in these moments that I knew I was fulfilling her girlhood dreams. Oh, it might be a cliché, but it’s true: most young ladies grow up fantasizing about the day that a small market radio jock from Delaware will whisk them away to the Cracker Barrel in Stevensville.

It was a fairytale romance.

Or maybe not; but it was ours. It was our relationship. It was real. We loved each other. We were building something.

When we tied the knot in October of 2011, we were vowing our lives to the other person, even though we’d never lived in the same state. We’d rarely spent more than two consecutive days with each other. We didn’t know all of each other’s bad habits. We didn’t know what the other was like on a day-to-day basis.

We had no nest egg, for that matter. We’d blown most of it funding our trips back and forth.

In other words, we weren’t “ready” for marriage. We hadn’t tried it out. According to conventional wisdom, we were “unprepared.” We didn’t take a turn in the Marriage Simulator. We didn’t live together for seven years and slowly glide into it. We were two, apart, only dating — courting, really — until we were one. We were unmarried, and then we were married.

No transition.

No warm up.

Read More