The Cool Married Club

I took the weekend off from blogging. We had a Weird Science themed surprise birthday party to attend on Friday night. Saturday we went to Marble Falls to join Camp Pizza. Camp Pizza was a weekend camping/wedding event for Kayla's workmates, Henri and Sara. They got married on Saturday evening. A lot of the others were camping out on Friday as well, but we joined them in time for a tree house party, followed by lots of wedding fun. The wedding was super sweet, and champagne corks arbitrarily popped during the ceremony. Afterwards we had wonderful wine, amazing food, and a very fun dance party. The Alamo crew knows how to throw down a good time and I always enjoy hanging out with them. On our drive home we started chatting about some of the other couples that we really enjoy spending time with. There are several guys who work in Kayla's department that she has always admired, and one attribute that they have in common is that they have awesome marriages. Once I met and spent a little time with them with their wives I understood the appeal. There isn't one guy from this category whom you would meet and within 10 minutes or so not know that he had a wife, and that he thinks his wife is awesome. I have spent some time with both of these couples and am also impressed by their mutual respect, obvious friendship, and pronounced commitment to their relationship. This struck a conversation about marriage in general. This seems to be a topic that we enjoy! We talked about how there seems to be a new wave of folks who are putting a new value on marriage. We consider ourselves to be part of this club. Marriage might have started to be looked upon pessimistically because a lot of folks in our culture don't take it seriously. We may have realized that one rusty idea of marriage seems like an institution that derived from something that our culture no longer stands for. Many of us are children of failed marriages and haven't grown up with much hope that it works. Many have been through marriages and realized that they were based on something that wouldn't stick, a need to please others, or maybe to be respected in our families, a pregnancy, or just an attempt at a marriage with a person without having a mutual and clarified understanding as to why the hell you were entering into it. But alas! Quite possibly something other than pessimism has been derived from the way some us have experienced our lives as products of our culture. The difference might be that we get married a little later than people historically have. We are experiencing ourselves as individuals a little longer than we used to. We have entered into other relationships without the end result of marriage being in mind. There is no pressure from ourselves because we have taken the need for that pressure away. We are individually capable of living our lives. We are individually capable of supporting ourselves and living meaningful, creative and successful lives. So it is a different thing all together when we spend time with another person and say "Hey, I want to marry you." It isn't because of God or because of parents or because of babies or romance, necessarily, and certainly not entirely. It is because we value ourselves, we value another person, and we value a partnership. The partnership, the relationship, the marriage...becomes an entity of its own. We value a relationship model where two people can together be better than one of those people can be on their own. It is because we have met that person who is so awesome, compliments us so greatly, helps us to better stand for what we stand for, better be who we want to be, that we decide to get married. That is awesome.

Here we are at Camp Pizza!