The love of my life

After all my blogposts from yesteryear about my wedding jitters I think it's time a write a little bit about Mary, my wife. This year we celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary. In 2005 we finally tied the knot after spending our weekends together in her house or mine for ten long years. Nobody can accuse us of rushing into marriage!

This is the picture we used for the wedding invitations

Mary is the undisputed love of my life. I knew the day I met her that she was special and that I wanted to be with her for a long time, maybe forever. She is very smart, funny, kind and loving. And she does a priceless bunny impression that never fails to crack me up! We have the same weird sense of of humour, and we have so much fun together.

She has excellent people skills, which is great because I have little to none. She's even good at talking to small children, which I'm crap at. She loves the third member of our little family, our cat Faith, with a passion. I tease her all the time about loving Faith just a little bit more than me!

And - the icing on the cake - she even likes George Michael! Not as much as I do obviously, but she did go to fifteen (!) 25Live shows. So I think it's safe to say she's a fan. But please don't call her that to her face, because she will probably glare at you and vehemently deny it!

And if the above makes out she's all sweetness and light, well of course she isn't. At times she's also a big pain in the butt, like every other person on the planet. She can get a bit nervous and as you can imagine that goes so well with my stress disorder. Sparks fly when we're both stressed out.

Has it always been easy these past 16 years? No it really hasn't. Holding on to your own dreams and remembering who you are proved a lot harder than 'living happily ever after' promised. Especially after I went through a long period of depression, things got dicey for awhile. It's not easy to see your own aspirations and ambitions come to nothing while your partner blossoms career-wise. On the other hand it must have been absolute hell for her to live with a partner who was seriously depressed. Depression is a nasty illness. It doesn't just suck the fun out of your own life, it spreads the non-joy around.

During the bad times the overriding feeling is loneliness. Apparently relationship stuff is another one of those human experiences, like grief, we're not supposed to talk about. Nobody really wanted to know. But we got through it and I'm so glad we toughed it out. To be loved by someone who knows you inside out but loves you anyway is a wonderful gift. A gift I'm truly thankful for.