“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.” Elizabeth Gilbert

When Nick and I started dating, we were proud, pompous asses who thought that we had the greatest relationship in the world (as seen on Facebook--"I have the best husband in the world!") We were friends, for certain. We did silly and strange things together. We were creative, shared a college major, common interests, and pet peeves. We were both Catholic (well, raised so) and wanted children. We hated pretention. We were passionate about writing, Italy, and everything vintage.

The summer after we got engaged, hauled up in our shoddy, downtown apartment, we pulled up the carpet to expose the paint-splattered, worn-out hardwood floor. Drinking cold beer and watching the rain fight through the French doors of the porch, we laughed and made plans about what we would do with the floor and how we were such a great couple because things like this were so much fun to do together. This is marriage! I thought.

We never did sand and seal the floor. In fact, all we did was drag the room of carpet out to the balcony, where it proceeded to get rained on all summer long. One humid day in August, when the stench of the carpet had even started to offend the mosquitoes, we faced the fact that we would have to find a way to get the 20 feet of rolled up, wet, moldy carpet off of the balcony (three stories off of the ground). No, Melissa, I thought. This is marriage.

Four years later, I’m not quite certain what marriage is. But I know it’s not that. It’ isn’t pulling up carpet in the rain; it’s not taking silly Polaroid pictures of each other or picking out furniture. Marriage isn’t even only about struggling with money. Everyone struggles with money. It’s great if a person’s spouse is also their best friend, but the truth is that your spouse really had better be your best friend. This doesn’t make a couple special, it makes them normal.

  The idea of marriage surfaces the first time that someone thinks that they just might not be able to do it anymore. When things get so tough that the word “divorce” sneaks into an argument, or even worse, into a person’s private thoughts, that’s when they understand what marriage is. It is the commitment to fight through the worst, to face the worst of their spouse, and to love them through it.

I know Nick has seen the most horrible in me. And I have seen the same in him. We’ve let each other down, made selfish choices, and done damage to the relationship that we used to think was so much better than everyone else’s. But that is the fire that has tested the metal of our love. And now, four years later, we have seen each other fully and understand what it means to love another person completely.

When we got married, we included Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 in our program. We were, after all, English majors that 1) wanted to show off our knowledge of Shakespeare (we get it, Melissa and Nick, you like to read) and 2) wanted to prove to the world that we were "the marriage of true minds." What we didn't understand was that, after several painful experiences, we finally understood what it meant to be married. Committed.

When all is said and done, there is no one that I trust more with my heart and with my life than Nick. It's a marvelous thing when we can sit in the middle of a storm together, look at each other and see the last six years of our relationship come to fruition, and crack a wholly inappropriate joke, open a bottle of wine, and still find ourselves in that substandard apartment during a rainstorm, tearing up the carpet. I love being married because it shows me that we are capable, as human beings, of seeing the whole of someone else, of facing the possibility of defeat, and then fiercely rejecting that defeat out of love, a love that we did not understand until now.

Happy Anniversary, Nick.