Marriage Doesn't Make You Boring

Marriage doesn't make you boring.

Kids do.

(Just kidding… sorta)

When I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I used to think that adults were boring. All they did was talk to other adults about the fall of communism, about how tired they were, and why Bush lost the election to Clinton. Oh, and the wheat harvest (but that’s because I was living in Kansas).

Adults were boring. I was not. My life was full and exciting, and the grown-ups had totally lost what it meant to have fun.

As I hit my teens I realized that OLD adults were boring, but the awesome college-age adults were so cool. (Then I became a college-age adult and stopped referring to them as adults. These were still kids. Just bigger.)

But the pattern continued. The people just ahead of me in life always seemed to have more fun and be more exciting and fulfilled than me, and so I longed to be like them. But skip a few years down the road to the old/married/children phases of life… that still looked kinda boring.

Then marriage stopped looking boring and started looking fan-freaking-tastic. After 27-ish years of singleness, Ivey and I entered matrimonial bliss and life settled down. Life still wasn't boring like I assumed it would be as that child (standing knee high to a grasshopper), but it assumed a comforting routine.

[Side note: My wife will read this and ask me “are you a settler or something? ‘Knee-high to a grasshopper?’ This is the 21^st century—who even says that?” I do, babe. I do.]

The fact of the matter is, marriage is pretty fun—jabs about my colloquialisms not withstanding—and I wouldn't trade it. Ivey and I have lots of fun doting on our dog, binging TV shows, going to plays and community events, etc. There’s a lot of freedom to being where we are in life, and it’s awesome.

It’s tempting to look at the future and see the impending arrival of kids and get discouraged because we can see this time of life fading. Soon we’ll be foster parents. Lord-willing we’ll someday be biological parents, too.

The fun of being able to do whatever we want, whenever we want, will be crushed and curtailed by little people. People that don’t realize their existence is not the only concern of ours, and who will drive us from this season of fun into the season of boring. They’ll be standing by their grasshoppers, grasping at those grasshopper knees, thinking how boring we are and how interesting they are and…

…they’ll be right. We’ll be boring. (Possibly because they have giant grasshoppers and we don’t.)

But here’s something odd. Not as odd as grasshoppers larger than nine-year-olds, but still odd.

As Ivey and I have been enjoying our almost-three years of marriage, there have been changes. I’m not referring to grey hair or aching joints (although those are beginning to occur), but more along the lines of preference changes.

I no longer want to get together with the guys and stay out until 2am solving the world’s problems. I don’t do spontaneous trips on Saturdays anymore. And I sure don’t order pizza every other day for a month anymore.

Those things have changed because I have changed. Life is different now. I still enjoy friends and trips and pizza, but I’m at a time in life where overdosing on those things isn’t practical or healthy or convenient.

Sometimes I lament this to Ivey. “I miss doing ______,” I tell her.

She used to ask me if that meant I regretted getting married. But of course, the answer is no. I wouldn’t trade having her in my life and all that comes with her for pizza and late nights with friends. Not at all. But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss doing those things—it just means I’ve found something that I value more than those things.

In the same way, I look forward to having kids and becoming “boring.” Yes, our lives will be less about what community events we’ll go to, what TV shows WE want to watch, or if the dog needs a Christmas sweater (she doesn’t).

Instead life will be about our family. It will be about keeping kids clothed and fed and affirmed and safe. It will be about nurturing someone else, pouring into them, and making sure they are cared for. It will stretch us, beat us down, and yes—probably make us look boring.

But we won’t be. We’ll just be in another phase of life—a new one, different from the ones before, where life isn’t about us. Like the transition from single to married, there’ll be things we miss (I’m told sleep is one of them), but it will be worth it.

And hopefully, once the kids have outgrown their grasshoppers and are happily on their way through life, they’ll see that and want the same kind of “boring” for themselves.