The word courting is defined in a lot of different ways by a lot of different people. Some people say courting is the period right before you get engaged. To other people, ourselves included, courting simply meant “dating” with the intention of marriage.
After we met, we knew from pretty early on we wanted to be married, so by the time we ruled out any red flags, and got to know each other and decided to become exclusive, we pretty much determined this would be a courtship, meaning we were working towards marriage.
I’ll be honest, those were some of the best days ever, but as we continued to grow in our relationship, I realized I was experiencing a lot of unchartered territory. I’ve been on the outside looking in to many relationships, and wouldn’t you agree, what happens is, we’ll see the couple meet, then we’ll get the highlight reel of the cute dates they went on, then we’ll skip forward to the engagement ring picture, then we’ll get our invitations in the mail.
There was a lot of in-between stuff I was experiencing that I wish people had told me how to deal with and what to expect. This is one reason I’m excited about us starting this blog when we did. I know we haven’t been through a lot, and this is by no means an advice blog, but we hope to share what we’re learning, both as a reference to our future selves and to help the couples coming after us to know what road bumps are up ahead.
The number one thing I wish someone had told me about courting was that there was a lot of choosing involved. The truth is that on the other side of every happy couple, is a history marked with long conversations, vulnerable moments, hard moments, mistakes, disappointments, disagreements, and a lot of other things that you wouldn’t see through the click of a camera.
How you deal with those moments is what determines your destiny. You may have found the best, most compatible partner in the world, but even in the best of relationships, you have to learn how to speak each other’s language and work towards oneness. In our case, it’s literally 25 years of my life experience, meeting 26 years of a completely different life experience, and trying to merge 51 years of life experience into one. That’s hard! But, I’ll also say, like so many others before, it’s hard, but it’s worth it.
Courting is an amazing time to practice choosing each other in the hard times, and the fact that you can both leave at any moment adds to that challenge, and to the growth. The other alternative if you don’t learn how to do this now, is that you’ll have to learn in marriage, when there is no out.
If you’ve found the one whom your soul loves, and they love you back and you decide to go for it, remember to choose each other when the choosing’s not easy. Even if your roads end up leading to different places, the experience will be invaluable.
