Lindsey Nordby

Just about a month ago, on May 30, my husband and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary. The thought that we have been married for a full year still blows my mind, because it feels like just yesterday we were sitting in our home (two homes ago) newly engaged and sorting through a calendar to select the best date to tie the knot.

As people have been asking me how the first year went, I’ve always responded with some recollection about how Michael and I’s lives didn’t change very much once we got married. Although as I’ve been thinking about it, that’s not true at all. At face value, sure, not much changed. We were already living together and both already felt that we were common-law married before we were officially married. The only thing that changed was how the state knew us, now married instead of two individuals.

I’ve been thinking about the last year and how tumultuous it’s felt with everything Michael and I trudged through, and it’s occurred to me that since we have gotten married, both Michael and I have really grown up. This is not to say that we were immature before, we were actually already both very mature for our young age. What I mean is we began to take leaps towards building the life we wanted. We spent a lot of time living in our small apartment fantasizing about “what could be”. There was a change in us, very suddenly after we got married, where we stopped fantasizing and began taking actionable steps to actually accomplish our goals.

One of the first things we did as a married couple was buy a house. We started this process at the end of June 2021, weeks after becoming man and wife. After finding and closing on our home was when the secondary and longer process of renovating began.

In the months that renovations were happening we also made some big career decisions. Michael started a new job after feeling worn out in his old position. I, on the other hand, was walking into some of the most difficult weeks job-wise, and I had no idea. After having worked as a real estate assistant for almost 2 years, I decided to get my own real estate license. I signed with a brokerage in downtown Denver in mid-October and started building my business. Not even a handful of weeks later, I was desperate for a paycheck and burnt out while trying to build my business from scratch. I got two temporary jobs, one with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and one at Starbucks. As I worked these positions I was wearing myself thin trying to simultaneously build my real estate business. I worked one transaction for my brother-in-law, helping him buy his first home. Shortly after that transaction concluded, I inactivated my license and went back to an 8-5 desk job.

Mix in personal struggles with anxiety, self-worth, etcetera, and that’s what I think of when I think of our first year married.

I share all of this with you to help shed some light on year one. We spent the first 12 months struggling, not in our relationship but with all of the outside things going on. It wasn’t easy. But we grew together and began to figure out what we do and don’t want for our future.

Although I want to come full circle to the beginning of this where I shared how the biggest change that we saw the past year is how Michael and I really grew up. We’re different people than we were a year ago. We’re more confident in ourselves. We’re taking steps towards repairing our physical and mental health struggles. We’re taking better care of ourselves. We’re more comfortably financially independent. Most importantly, we’re happy with where we’re at in all aspects of our life and marriage.

Even though times got tense with installing floorboards or replacing the baseboards or whatever crazy project we decided to tackle in a weekend, we learned how to love deeper and fuller. Our first year of marriage was a good one in a relational sense, and despite everything that we put ourselves through externally, we are still happier than ever with the decision to marry one another.

This is not to say we don’t still dream about the future; we both still spend all of our free time scrolling Zillow and dreaming about the future. But we aren’t feeling worn and tired about our current situation.

I know a lot of this makes it sound like our whole year was one hard thing after another. This is always what it feels like when I think back on it. But in the middle of all those difficulties, there were a lot of beautiful days and great times together. The hard days are so much easier to remember, but never forget all the good ones too. Those are often the more important ones.

After all is said and done, I hope you can take a few things away from all of this:

• Instead of spending your time only dreaming, if it is possible to take steps to the future you want, DO IT!
• You can still grow in your relationship regardless of the external factors or hardships.
• Allow the difficult days and weeks to push you and your partner together; sort through the difficulties as a couple instead of allowing it to push you apart.
• Always strive to be better than you currently are! You can always grow!
• Just because things might feel hard, reflect on all the in-betweens. (There are SO many good things that happened in our first year of marriage that easily gets forgotten.)
• Don’t forget that growing pains will always happen no matter what you are currently going through. It’s just a matter of how you handle them and what you take away that matters.
• Never forget why you wanted to marry/date your partner in the first place.

So, in one year of marriage, our lives have pretty much completely changed. It’s not “just the same” like I’ve gotten comfortable telling people. But, I love my husband deeper and better now than I did a year ago, we are happy, and we are actively building a life that looks towards the future, and that’s all that matters.