000012 — They grew together

Today is our 16th anniversary, and I am on a flight from NYC to LA to meet my bride, life companion, and best friend for a long weekend together, relaxing, laughing, and taking a much-needed pause after the holidays and a demanding start to the year.

I am sitting here on the plane, finally catching a breath after a fast-moving and chaotic morning. I cannot believe that I made this flight. Now that I am thinking about it, less than two and a half hours ago, I was waking up in my hotel room, getting started for the day.

I have a hard-and-fast rule that I don’t look at my phone or devices for at least 30 minutes after waking up, oh boy, and when I did.

I had messages regarding the improbability of leaving NYC as intended in a few days, so I continued down my message list and opened the thread with Lauren. She gave me three options: (a) stay in NYC and welcome getting stuck, (b) cancel the trip and I fly home today, or (c) LA?

I laughed, because I already knew what we were going to do. Option c, of course.

I made calls to switch arrangements, as did she, and in moments our plans changed.

This is one of thousands of changes we’ve had to navigate over our union so far, and if there’s one attribute that has evolved the most, it’s how flexible “we” have become.

Early in our relationship, it was challenging to play well together on the same team. Sure, we were on the same team, playing the same game with the right intentions and motivations. We hadn’t yet learned how to play well together, and the last 15 years have been an imperfect journey in becoming great teammates.

Part of what made it hard early on, at least for me, is that my default setting was survival. Not because I didn’t love her. Because my body didn’t always know the difference between conflict and danger, between uncertainty and threat. I could solve almost anything, and I couldn’t always stay soft while solving it.

And Lauren, somehow, has always had this way of inviting me back into the room. Back into the present. Back into us. Not with pressure. With steadiness.

For lack of a better analogy, we are like the best NBA players who can throw those insane no-look passes. You don’t throw that pass unless you trust your teammate will be there.

And you do not get there by accident. You get there through reps. Through forgiveness. Through the boring practice of returning to each other until trust becomes muscle memory.

There’s this saying, “they grew old together,” that I typically only hear at funerals, or when someone is describing or reflecting on their parents’ or grandparents’ marriages. It’s this admiration for what was.

And in this moment, I am grateful for the awareness to sit and process what is, because what is right now is really good.

I have such an appreciation because I know how far we’ve come, and I can see how each year we’ve grown, closer, in alignment, in flexibility, in intimacy, in friendship, in togetherness. There are versions of us that could not have held the life we hold now. There are versions of us that would have tried to control the variables instead of learning how to move through them.

And the irony is, the more we’ve learned to adapt, the safer it feels. Not because the world got predictable, but because we did.

I hope one day our children can say they saw us grow together and stay playful while we did. That they watched two people learn how to play the game of life together, which, like any game, has unlimited changing and unknown variables, and they handled it brilliantly.

Not perfectly. Brilliantly.

Sixteen years have flown by. I am blown away by how far we’ve come, and God willing, how much more life we have together.

It’s one of the greatest joys and pleasures in life when you find someone worth making you rethink your thoughts and reconsider your actions. It wasn’t until this exact moment that I realized how important that process is in a relationship, and when you can welcome it, the unbelievable life you can build together.

Maybe that’s the real gift of marriage. Not that you avoid change. That you learn how to change together. That you become the kind of team that can reroute a whole weekend in a text thread, laugh, make the calls, and stay connected while life keeps moving.

We grew together. And we are still growing.

Sixteen years later, I’m sitting in this seat, and I can feel the difference. We can take a morning that tries to break the plan and turn it into a shared laugh and a new route. We can move fast and stay connected.

That’s what I’m celebrating today.