Research

So, I'm doing an informal survey among my married friends, mostly because I'm curious about their answers (is there really any other reason?) but also because I kind of want to know where my relationship stands on the This is Perfectly Normal Meter. If you want to take part, repost on your blog, like any other meme, or you can just email me. Unmarried/divorced/just livin' together friends, you can do this too, just alter the question to fit your needs. Leave me a comment if you do this so that I know. I'm gonna go ahead and post my answers to the questions here, because that's only fair.

Love, S

1. So...how'd ya meet? Online. This used to really embarrass me, and I'd make up some story, but whatever. Lots of people meet online now and I've gotten over myself.

2. How long did you date before you slept together? Hmm maybe I shouldn't have asked this question, or at least volunteered to answer, my mom reads this site sometimes. Oh well, dive right in. Justin and I slept together the first night we met. He tromped over to my house in the middle of the night and at first, that's all there was, sleeping, but you know I'm just so freakin' irresistible. Hear that sound? Yeah, my parents just had strokes.

3. How long before you became engaged? This is a sort of tricky question, there was never any like giant proposal with a hot air balloon ride or anything, at some point, it just became clear that we were either going to get married or continue living in sin for the rest of our natural lives. Either one would have been fine with both of us, but we think that deciding to get married was the best choice we've ever made, most of the time. We bought the ring though after we'd been together for about a year and a half.

4. Did you live together at any point before you tied the knot? Yes. I know it's not really the popular opinion among politicians and parents these days, but I really do feel like it made us better prepared for marriage. I could expound on the virtues of Living in Sin for pages but I'll leave it at: Yes, we lived together for nearly 3 years before our wedding.

5. Whether you did or didn't, how do you think this affected your relationship? Oh look I get to talk about it after all! Living together before the big day was helpful in a lot of ways. I didn't have to suddenly wake up married and realize that I was spending the rest of my life with someone who leaves his underwear in the kitchen because hey, I knew that already and I had decided to be ok with it. I didn't have the notion that somehow marriage would change Justin from Gamerboy to Husband Who Mows the Lawn Every Friday in a Golf Shirt. He knew that I wake up every morning and behave like a lunatic who can't stand to be touched or talked to for at least 7 minutes. He was also aware that on weekends, if we don't have plans, I like to sit around in my nightgown without combing my hair for 3 days and watch reruns of CSI, and he decided for himself that it was fine. No surprises.

6. How long was your engagement? About a year, if I'm being realistic. We bought the ring in May of 2005 and then we were married in May of 2006. However, we hadn't planned to get married until October 2006, so we didn't actually start planning until oh...February and then when we suddenly moved the date up I had to run around like a maniac getting things together. You can read all about it here.


7. After you got married, were you surprised by anything that your new husband/wife did? Nope. By then we'd been living together for a long time, like I said, no surprises.

8. Have you had or do you want to have kids? How many? The short answer: We don't know. The long answer: I have kind of started to feel like kids can't make things better. We're already happy now, so we don't need a child to make us happy, and what if it made us unhappy? It's not a risk I'm willing to take, you can't return a baby to the mall. If we weren't happy, a child could only make things more stressful than they already are. We certainly can't afford a baby right now, and even if we could, wouldn't that money be better spent on more pairs of shoes, video games and vacations? If we do decide to become parents, in the (far) future, we only want one.

Thanks in advance to anyone who fills this out for me, and I look forward to seeing your answers! I may post more questions later, I'll label that Research 2 or something equally clever *grin,* you can answer all of them or none of them or 2 of them, whatever. Thanks again!