22 years ♥

Today John & I celebrate 22 years of marriage!

How many 38 & 40 year olds can say that?!!

How do I explain how much this man means to me..... He is my best friend, my soul mate, my lover, my hero, my All. He rocks my world!!

I love the way he loves our daughters.... I love the way he loves our little dog and carries him around like a baby.... I love how he can fix everything and anything and loves doing it! I love his laugh, when he gets the giggles at the dinner table, when he laughs at my jokes or at me because I screwed the joke up. I love how he can be silly in front of a crowd and not get embarrassed.

(like the photo below which was taken at his Christmas party)

I LOVE this man!!! ♥ ♥ ♥

The day after Meg graduated I was reflecting on the past 22 years....unbelievable that it flew by the way it has. Thinking about how long John & I have been together (23 years last October) and about everything we have been through. How we have beat the statistics several times.

Being emptynesters for the last year and a half has taught us a lot about each other. We had to learn to live together in a way we never had to before. After we got married we didn't move in with each other until that March (after John finished Tech school) and by then Meg was already a little over a month old. So we always had a child in the home with us....then when Tori moved out, we were alone for the first time EVER! What an adjustment! We have since learned each other and have grown closer and more deeper in love. ♥

Now, don't get me wrong, our marriage isn't always blissful. We are human, we're two individuals who are in a relationship; fights are always going to happen; that's a given.

We have our disagreements and debates like any other couple.

We have our smackdown, dragout fights, too---where we are mad as hell, saying words that cut like a razor...knowing all to well we don't mean them the minute they come out of our mouths. We are vocal fighters----we scream, we cuss, we scream some more. I know not every marriage argues/fights this way...but we do....it's us!

We have had our share of ups & downs and managed to stay strong in our relationship and learn from our mistakes.

The one good thing about these kinds of fights is the make up sex afterward, it is more intense, stronger, hotter, sweeter and better!!! We forget everything we had just argued about and it leaves us feeling physically and mentally relaxed and rejuvenated. It brings us closer, understanding each other. The depth of our relationship is a beautiful thing.

And when it's all said & done--our love is still there.....our relationship stronger than before.

One of the best description of love is from the movie Captain Corelli's Mandolin:

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two."
-St. Augustine

That's US!