Life Together

Writing about your spouse in a public forum is always an iffy proposition. There is absolutely nothing that I could write here that is going to come close to capturing how wonderful I find Elizabeth Anne Cox to be. It’s fruitless. Yet I’m going to try anyway. After all, marriage is about love, commitment, fidelity, but it is also about trying each and every day.

I would not be here if it were not for EA. And I don’t mean “here” as in this website, but “here” as in where I am physically writing this. I am sitting in my in-laws’ living room (or den, one of these days I’m going to figure out the difference between those two rooms) in Nashville. 

In fact, take away EA and everything around me vanishes: the house I am in, my mother-in-law across the room, my father-in-law downstairs, our dog Obie sleeping on the floor, our incredible 14 month old son hypothetically napping upstairs. Even the computer - a birthday present from EA - on which I am typing all this would be gone. All of this vanishes from my life if you take away the girl on the other end of the couch.

That’s staggering. I could keep digging through my life and things would keep vanishing: friends, our church, our home, where I am in life, lessons learned, etc. It’s crazy to think about. Our wedding day six years ago fused our lives together. Now we are still two, separate and whole, functioning individuals apart from one another. But our lives are completely intertwined in a way that I could not have anticipated beforehand. 

We live in a world where that fusing of lives together is frightening (by the way, there are some people that are genuinely called to remain single; this is next paragraph is not about you fine folks). Sure there are scores of romantic comedies that litter movie screens each year, but the bulk of those are about falling in love. Rarely do you see them continuing to choose to love year after year. We like the instantaneous, the rush, and the feeling of romance. Life together is something different. To a society that treasures individualism, it is a repudiation of independence.

But I’m so thankful that I have found a person with whom to share my life. It is not always perfect or easy. We both sacrifice for one another and, even after six years of marriage, we’re still trying to figure one another out. Yet in spite of that and often through that we grow closer. I am so glad that we decided to commit ourselves to each other six years ago today. I love EA and I pray that I never take our life together for granted. 

What I just wrote doesn’t come close to capturing how wonderful I find her to be. I just wanted to close with that, because she’s rather ridiculously wonderful.

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