I have been married for almost thirteen years and marriage can become tedious after all that time, especially once kids enter the scene.  I decided to join Chasing a Daredevil and Twins Before We Wed – Blogging Challenge because I thought it would be fun to reflect back to the days when my relationship was new, fresh, and kid-free.

This is a seven day challenge, but I know that I can’t post once every seven days with my schedule, so I will post to this challenge whenever I get a chance.  Here is the challenge:

1. Share the first picture of you and its story:

I had some great pictures of my husband and I before we started dating.  We met in a freshman Econ class sixteen years ago. He told me long after we were married that he saw me for the first time in a multicolored belly sweater (belly shirts were stylish during the late nineties) and he had to talk to me.  So he made it happen through our mutual friend who also took the class. We ended up becoming friends and kept in touch by correspondence that entire summer after freshman year (email and text messaging were not a thing back then).

When we moved into our current home, all of my photos disappeared along the way.  I have no clue where the pictures went, so I don’t have our first picture together.  I do have this picture, which I keep in a frame.

This picture was taken before we were even dating.  We would try and hang out every weekend. This picture was taken during one of those nights. We would have a few drinks together and then I would go out with my girlfriends and he would go do whatever with his fraternity brothers. I miss those fun and irresponsible times.  It was a time before kids, and bills, and taxes, and house payments. We had no responsibilities and life during college was always fun.

This is a picture of us a few years ago. We had been married for quite a few years and had demanding careers, but we didn’t have kids yet. I love this picture because we were still pretty carefree at that point in our lives. We worked hard and played hard.

Now, we can’t stand still long enough to have a picture taken together. We recently took a few days off of work for a kid-free trip to New Orleans. The awesome trip reminded me of the days when we had no responsibilities. We were able to relax together without worrying about grown-up stuff. We asked someone to snap this picture of us at lunch. This is right before I tried reverting back to my college partying ways. I ended up falling asleep at dinner and getting super sick. I just can’t do it like I used to.

So over the sixteen years since we met, our responsibilities have increased, our stress has increased, our wrinkles have increased, the quality time we get to spend together has decreased, our tolerance for late nights has decreased, but our love for one another has remained steady.  And that’s all that really matters.