All the men I've fallen in love with while I was married...

Confession time. I have been in love with 6 different men, since I first fell in love with my husband 10 years ago, and I don't intend to stop falling in love with more, any time soon.

When I was 18 years old, I fell in love with a boy. He was my breath of fresh air. He made life simple and he made it fun. He made me realize there's something magical in not having every minute of life always calculated out. He never stressed, he just went with the flow of life. So, when I was given the chance, I married that boy, 4 years later. It was on that day, I vowed to always love the man I had fallen in love with. The problem with those vows is I didn't realize then, that I had married a boy, not a man.

Shortly after our wedding, reality struck us hard.  I was fresh out of college, no job. My husband just started what we thought would be a new career path in insurance, and ended up being a dead end job. We were broke. For Christmas that year, we gifted hand soaps from our own stash under our bathroom cupboard with cheesy gift tags that read " May your Christmas be filled with peace, joy and soap...we mean hope." Yea. It was that bad. I remember laying in bed, in our rental house, trying to convince my husband to run away from me. To go off the grid. We wouldn't answer to anyone, we wouldn't owe anyone anything. Just me and him, surviving with the bare minimum. I remember it so well, because that was that night I fell out of love with the boy I once loved so much. He laid there in the dark and simply said "We couldn't do that. Because, that's not you. You would never last. You would miss your family. You would miss out on your career you worked hard for, and that's no way to raise kids. They deserve stability." It was that moment I realized, the carefree, non-calculated boy I fell in love with was no more. He was transforming into a thoughtful, responsible adult. This exact moment is when I fell in love for the second time in my life.

I always had this vision of my husband, before we were even married, of him being the perfect partner in parenthood, the ying to my yang, so to speak. He would make all my stressful situations feel lighter with his stress-free persona. He would carry me through all my struggles, and be our saving grace when the baby would be fussy. I imagined he would just smile, and tell jokes through all the pitfalls of parenting, because that's who he was. He was never stressed. He was always joking. So, 6 months into marriage, we got pregnant with our son. I became a mother 3 months shy of my 24th birthday, my husband was 25. After we got home, and the "new baby high" wore off, it turned out, he was not the father I had imagined him to be. He was not always the ying to my yang. He in fact, didn't tell many jokes, and instead of helping to make light of a stressful situation he just slept through them, snoring, loudly. After my husband became a father, I saw him stress for the first time in our relationship.  Soon we were trying to learn how to balance work, parenting and married life. The balance was never equal, and normally our marriage was the suffering end. It was throughout this next phase of our marriage, first-time parenting, that I soon fell out of love with the "adult" version of my husband.

After many nights crying in the shower, it just hit me. I was upset over all these expectations I had of my husband as a father, that he was not meeting. Mind you, these were expectations I had set for him, before he even took one step into fatherhood. Here he was now, for the first time, with a wife and a child to support, and protect. This was all new to him, as it was me, and he was learning how to adjust. Of course he wasn't going to be that stress free, always joking boy he once was so long ago. I realized, then, that I didn't want him to be those things. I wanted him to be the adult and father he was, supporting and protecting his family the best way he knew how, which he was doing just fine. When I got out of the shower, I walked into the living room, and saw my husband rocking our baby boy to sleep, while watching nursery rhymes on T.V. This is the third time I fell in love. I fell in love with my husband, as a first time father, and a dang good father at that.


I stayed in love with the " first time father" version of my husband for quite some time. It was a bittersweet romance. I didn't always like him, and he didn't always like me. Some days between work, baby spit up, and one of us falling asleep rocking the baby in the living room we would go with out kissing each other good night, or at all. Then there were days, like when our son first walked. That we would rejoice in our parenting, and our partnership, and this beautiful family we created. I'm actually still "in-love" with this version of him. It's an ongoing love affair with the current version he's at.

Seven years into our story we got hit with what felt like the biggest bomb yet, infertility. This is also the fourth time I fell in love with my husband. I called him during a break at work. I was standing in the parking lot, and the world felt like it was alarmingly smaller. I couldn't catch my breath, and when he answered my call, all I could get out was "I'm broken. It's my fault." Through all the sobs, I did my best and explained to him the news the doctor had delivered to me. I remember how worthless I felt. I remember the guilt I felt for my husband, for having to be stuck with the broken version of me. I just kept apologizing on the phone for it all. It was in this moment, a glimpse of the boy I fell in love with came out of him. He told me some jokes, and made light of it, to make me laugh. He reassured me, I was not broke, and he would always love me, even this version. He made me feel that this was just a curve ball life threw at us, but we would still conquer. He was my breath, when I needed it most. That version of him, the boy-husband-adult-father of my (possibly only) child, might be one of my most comforting loves of them all.

The fifth time I fell in love is the one that brings me to tears. It's when I saw my husband, holding all 3 of our children, for the first time. That is the version of him, that makes me feel entirely whole. My entire life, in one entanglement. Everything we have endured, all the obstacles we found a way around, this is the prize for all of it. There has never been a time before that version of him, that my heart and soul have vibrated on the same level. That version of him with all 3 of our children, is my version of true love.


This brings us to the most recent time I fell in love, which was more gradual than the others. It's been a process, of realizing the boy I fell in love with at 18, was just that, a boy. When I fell in love so young, I didn't consider that the person I loved would grow, and evolve and in the same, so would our love. I've watched him grow from a naive, world-at-his-fingertips boy, to a man. A man with a place in this world, and a sense of purpose. A career, a home, and a family. The sixth time I fell in love, it was with all of the versions of the person I first fell in love with many years ago. All those versions added up to help make the man he is now. The man I most recently have come to know and love.

The hardest part about marrying so young is the growing. The growing you do yourself, and the growing your partner does. The success in it all, is choosing to know when to do the growing together and when the growing needs to be done individually. I know neither one of us are done growing. There are many versions of us yet to be unveiled. Many more times to fall in and out of love are to be had.  I'm sure we won't always like the versions of each other or of ourselves for that fact. That's the beauty in it all. Looking back when we are old, and on the verge of senile, we will have one heck of a love story to tell, of two people who grew together.