Midway through the summer between Junior and Senior year of high school, Jennie and I found ourselves on a trip in South Texas. We had to drive back home to Oklahoma. It was just us; no parents, no adults, and just miles upon miles of open road running the central Texas prairie. We spent the whole day together, most of it submerged in torrential rains. There was a monster gulf storm that seemed to follow us the entire length of Texas. We laughed about it and talked for the whole trip. There are a lot of things we still talk about from that trip. After a nine hour drive that should have only taken five, thanks to the storm, and luck perhaps, we arrived back home. By the end of the day, though, we weren’t quite ready to part ways.
We stayed together for what was left of the day and we found ourselves talking again in her room. That night, I was laying on her bed after we had been talking for a long time. It was not a particularly special conversation. If my life relied upon retelling even a single word of it, I would be gone forever. It was just more of the same little nothings kids in love talk about late at night; music, movies, each other, the events of the day.
There was a moment of silence where I began to think back about the day. It was perfect. I had spent the whole thing just hanging out with this beautiful wonderful girl who made me happy. I wanted it to be like that forever. The seed of a notion began to take root and reach up toward the light in my mind.
"(What is going to happen to us after high school? Will we be able to stay together?)” I wondered.
...
“(We probably won't be able to. Not in the real world. She’ll probably go to college and who knows where I will end up?)”
…
“(I don't want to lose her. Probably, the only real way this could work is if we got married.)”
…
“(I wish we were old enough that getting married might be an option.)”
…
“(Why, exactly, aren’t we old enough? What really makes a person old enough to get married?)”
…
“(Why should I wait until I am older to find the girl I want spend the rest of my life with, anyway?)”
...
(Jennie is everything I want...)
…
Returning to reason, momentarily, I caught hold of the hazardous progression of thoughts taking place in my head.
“(This is crazy. I am only seventeen. I can't know what I want in a woman. Why would I even be thinking is?)"
I laid in silence for a while longer, pensively staring at the ceiling. This idea of mine wouldn’t leave me. I kept on thinking about the inevitable reality that High School couples don’t last after High School.
I decided the only way to resolve the situation was to give her the responsibility of proving to me that this was supposed to happen. There would need to be some test to validate my inkling. It would have to be something difficult, but that a good wife would be able to do, at least by limited imagination of what it meant to be a good wife. If she somehow passed the test, then my mind would be made up. If she failed, perhaps it was never meant to be, anyway. I could be done with the emotionally charged internal debate and go back to being a seventeen year old kid, free of the ludicrous tugging of fanciful heartstrings. Fate would determine what I needed to know.
"(She is great, but there needs to be something else. I need a woman who gets me. I think that a good wife should be able to understand when something is wrong with her husband, even if he doesn't say anything at all. I have probably been thinking about this for a while. If she asks me in the next minute if something is wrong I am going to ask her to marry me.)"
It was an impossible thing to ask. It wasn’t fair to her to ask such a question. I had based the future of our relationship on a belief that a wife needed to have a telepathic level of empathy toward her potential partner. It was wrong to do that to her, put so much of a burden on her that relied on her never even knowing she was being tested. It was a foolish thing to do. A wiser person would have realized that thoughts like mine were the types of ideas which ruined what would have otherwise been beautiful relationships. If I were a wiser man, I probably would have never thought this. Fate would prove thought, that it didn’t matter.
Had I had the time to consider my thought processes, I may have dismissed it as the uncontrolled daydreaming of an infatuated youth. I didn't have the time, though. As I finished that fateful sentence in my mind, literally, as the period landed in the sentence of my thoughts, I heard a whisper from the other side of the bed.
"Jon, is everything alright?" Jennie said.
“...”
“(What? Seriously?)” These were only real thoughts I could muster. I was startled at the immediacy of which my test was passed. I didn't even have time to realize what a stupid idea that was! To place one’s fate in the whims of miraculous luck!
Perhaps, however, it wasn’t really luck. Perhaps it was exactly what I needed to do, and her reaction, was exactly what I needed to hear.
“(Umm... No. It is ok.)” I thought, gathering myself.
…
“(She is the perfect woman for me. And I did say that I would, so I am going to. I'm doing this.)"
I rolled over and looked at her. She was concerned by my apparent absence. I talked to her and told her what I felt. I told her what my mind had been up to and what I had decided. I told her how much the time we spent together meant to me and how I never really wanted this day to stop. I told her that I wanted to spend my life with her.
That’s when I asked her to marry me. That was it. That was all the thinking about it and planning that I done. I hadn't ever really considered it before that, not really. At that moment, though, I made a choice that was by far the most important of either of our lives, and I did it almost completely on impulse. There was no planning; no consultations; no time for hesitation.
In all honesty, if you find a woman who is sweet, smart, hardworking, and wonderful in all the ways you need, you should consider taking a few chances for her. If, however, you find a girl who does all this and also instinctively understands you so well that her abilities border on clairvoyance, you really need to drop everything and take the leap of faith. I was rash like a child and almost completely driven on emotion with only the slightest ounce of reason to back it up.
Her concern over the few minutes I spent in silence a few moments earlier had transformed to a stunned silence.
She said she would have to think about it...
Think about it.
Those words hung in the air for a moment and my heart sank. Sank is perhaps the wrong word. Sank is too soft of a word. My heart crashed to floor taking with it my raptured spirit. Both descended with an almost audible thud.
What had I just done?
I told her that thinking it over would be fine and that I understood. That was a lie. I was scared, terrified to be precise. I was struck sick. Literally sick. Once the cold realization of the brash actions and all the potential consequences were fully realized I was left with the feeling that you get that there is a deep, deep chasm in your chest when you suddenly realize that you have already lost something extremely important, but the actual event was yet to occur. It was the looming presence of doom. More than anything, at that moment, I was wishing so very, very much to have been afforded, just for one moment in my life, the ability to return three minutes back in time and forget the whole thing ever happened. Internally, I was a wreck. Outwardly… I said that I understood. As I said before, that was lie.
It was late, so I slept on her couch that night. That was one of the worst nights I have ever had. I knew that was one the most reckless things I had ever done.
“Oh God,” I thought. “She is going to get freaked out and break up with me.”
…
“She will tell the whole school and make a laughing stock of me.”
…
“I should just walk in there and take it back... Stupid.”
…
“Then again,” I considered. “She might say, ‘Yes”…"
Eventually exhaustion from the day took over and I was able to go to sleep a few desperate hours later. The next morning I went to see her. We talked for a few minutes. She didn’t bring it up, as if neither of us must have been thinking about the giant, invisible thing sitting there in the room with us. We would probably still be sitting there if I didn’t work up the courage to ask, again. I asked her what she thought about last night. After the night I had just had, I have never been so afraid to ask a question, let alone, ask it again. All my worrying and the cold sweat I finally fell asleep in didn’t prepare me for what she said.
She said that she spent the whole night thinking of reasons why she shouldn't do it. That was swift kick in the stomach. Then she opened her mouth, as if to finish the thought. The next thing she said was that she couldn't come up with any.
She said, “Yes.”
That was how we decided we would get married. We were still seventeen.
We didn't tell anyone because, frankly the community wouldn't support two seventeen year olds considering the idea of marriage. We grew up in a small town, but this wasn't the 1950's, after all. It just wasn’t wise. It wasn’t normal. It was ludicrous by almost any standard you could logically imagine. The town would not be understanding. Then there would be our families. How would you accept it? What if your son or daughter told them they planned to get married and haven’t even began Senior year of high school? This was something we would do alone. Together, but alone.
We spent the next year "preparing" ourselves for it, “it” being a life of marriage directly following a life of childhood. After school we laid in bed talking about our fantastic plans and built up our dreams together. ‘How many kids would we want?’, ‘What type of house would we want to live in?’, ‘What jobs would we have?’, ‘Would we have dogs or cats? Or both? How many?’
I think that that year was actually much more important for us than the romantic story above. We really contemplated our situation and started to really grasp the things we had to do. We began to think like married people as we kept up our secret engagement.
That's when, I think, "I" and "me" started to dissolve into the much greater solution that is "us" and "we". It’s an important transition. I don’t think most couples appreciate the moments that erode the self into something greater that two individuals. You don’t really realize when it happens. There was just a moment when you stopped making plans for you. You instinctively wonder how your choices will affect not only yours, but her life. If you’re lucky, that other person will feel the same way. Everything is “we” from then on.
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