Young Wife's Guide

Welcome back to part 2 of Jaimie’s story about being married young during the Share Your Story series. Jaimie shared yesterday about how she met and married her hubby in college.

Jaimie shared with us yesterday that she met her sweet hubby Joshua freshman year of college. They met, fell in love and got married not too long after. Now they are just days away from celebrating their 1st wedding anniversary and still working their way through college.

A lot of their story about being married in college really strikes home with me and reminds me of my college days being married to my sweetheart :) Jaimie shares some wonderful insights into the good and the bad of being married young!

Our wedding day was a dream come true.  It was beautiful in every way; we were blessed by so many family and friends.  I still didn’t know at the time what I was really getting myself in for.  I don’t think either one of us did.  Our honeymoon, and the weeks and months following, brought surprises that we weren’t expecting at all—some of them great, some of them really hard.

Basically, being married is the most amazing and the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  A lot of those good and bad things come a result of being married as young as we are.

Bad things:

-a lot of people did not support us in our decision to marry young, people we liked and respected.

-we’re still in college and we “miss out” on some of the usual social aspects of college life.

-we don’t have a lot of money.  Sometimes that’s hard.

-we still live near family and it’s not easy to be completely independent from them.  They like being a big part of our lives, which isn’t all bad, but it will be nice when we live farther away.

-most of our friends, especially those from high school, don’t understand our life now since we were the first of our friends to get married.  We have much less in common with them.

Good things:

-we’re still in college.  Our responsibilities are, compared to what they will be in the future, quite few.

-our parents supported us completely in our decision to marry when we did.

-we only had to deal with pre-marriage temptations for about a year and a half, instead of the three or four years it would have been if we didn’t marry till after graduation.

-we have a head start on learning what it’s like to be married and to be a godly husband and wife.

-we were not interested in being single anymore and now we get to enjoy all the benefits of marriage, long before most of our peers.

-we’ve been forced to grow up faster, since we’re faced with the responsibilities of adults.

-we’re learning how to make do with a small apartment and not a lot of money.

-we have married friends in college; we get to support and encourage each other.

-I love having our own home.

-we’ll be younger than average when we start having children, and we’ll be younger than average when our children eventually leave home.

-we both are better equipped to serve God together than apart.

This has been our experience.  We do our best to make God the highest priority in our lives and to serve, honor and obey him in everything.  We don’t always succeed in that but when we fail he is always forgives us.  We have learned already that forgiveness is the most essential ingredient to a happy marriage: forgiving one another as readily and sincerely as God forgives us.  Yes, we’re two young sinners, but we’re also children of God saved by grace.  That’s what makes any marriage work.

I think I can say with confidence that I will never regret marrying young.  It’s not for everyone; every couple has to make their own decisions.  But in our case, I think things couldn’t have gone better.  I love my life as a wife, homemaker and college student.  I love that some of my friends are married, an increasing number are engaged, and others are single.  It’s a blast to go to classes with my husband.  I get a kick out of people’s reactions when I tell them I’m twenty and going on my first anniversary.  I’m already blessed to be a blessing to other young women who are preparing for marriage.  And Joshua and I get all this time to be just the two of us before we are ready for children.

No, being married young is not easy.  It’s only by God’s grace and with his strength and courage that we’re able to live our lives.  But if I could go back a year and a half, with the knowledge I have now, and have that choice to make again, I’d choose to do it exactly the way we did.  And I know my husband would say the same.

Jaimie Ramsey is a wife, homemaker, writer and college student.  She and her husband Joshua will be celebrating their first anniversary this month.  She loves cooking, reading, writing, and spending time with her husband and their family and friends.  Find her on Facebook and on her blog, Living in the Light. 

Welcome to the first post in a new series: Share Your Story- Young Wives. Over the next couple of weeks I will be sharing YOUR love stories of being married young. Want to hear more young married stories? Follow by email, RSS feed, or Facebook to get daily updates and new posts.

Today Jaimie from Living in the Light is sharing how she met her sweet hubby Joshua. This is part 1 of 2.
Since I was a little girl, getting married and being a wife has always been at the top of my list of what I wanted to be.  One of my favorite dress-up dresses was a bridal outfit.

I never expected, or planned, to get married as young as I did.  I never dated in high school—mainly because the guys I was interested in never asked me out, and the only person who ever asked me on a date was someone I had no interest in at all.  So when I met my husband, on our first day at college, I definitely didn’t see where it would all go, especially not as fast as it did.

We met onAugust 22, 2009.  I had finally told God that summer, “Okay, I’m fine with being single for now; I’m going to focus more on my relationship with you and on my college studies.”  Potential boyfriends were not really on my radar, but I didn’t walk around with my eyes shut, either.  That afternoon in a Christian hang-out spot for college students, I was just looking to meet new friends.

But then my roommate and some other friends struck up a conversation with this tall, blond, muscular, good-looking guy with a great smile and laugh.  His name was Joshua.  He was a pastor’s kid, he had been homeschooled for a few years, he was one of five children, and he was going to be a teacher or a pastor.  I was intrigued.

Two weeks later, we started dating.  That was not in my plans at all.  Looking back, we could have moved more slowly, but I don’t regret the way things ended up.  We had a talk a couple days after we started dating.  An awkward talk.  Neither of us really wanted to date just to have the relationship end in a breakup.

So I asked him, “Can you see this being…a permanent thing?”  And he could.  We didn’t talk seriously about marriage right away.  But we did by that Christmas, not quite four months later.  The sooner, the better, we decided.  It was actually my dad who picked the date.  We wanted to get married the Christmas of our sophomore year.  He asked that we wait till the next May, for the weather to be better and his (and Joshua’s dad’s) schedules to be more open.  So Memorial Day weekend, 2011 was the set date.

A word of advice for anyone not yet married or engaged: fifteen months is a long time to be engaged.  Do avoid lengthy engagements if at all possible.  That “in-limbo” stage was not an easy time for us.  We knew we were going to be married, but we weren’t yet, and waiting was hard for a lot of reasons.  By God’s grace, we stayed virgin till our wedding night, but our engagement was not without its major mistakes.  Thank God for his constant forgiveness; those sins are erased completely.

Waiting was absolutely worth it, though.  Our wedding day was a dream come true.  It was beautiful in every way; we were blessed by so many family and friends.  I still didn’t know at the time what I was really getting myself in for.  I don’t think either one of us did.  Our honeymoon, and the weeks and months following, brought surprises that we weren’t expecting at all—some of them great, some of them really hard.

Basically, being married is the most amazing and the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  A lot of those good and bad things come a result of being married as young as we are.

Come back tomorrow as Jaimie shares with us the good and the bad of being married young. If you were married young then you won’t want to miss this list. She so perfectly summarized what I have long felt about being married young.

Jaimie Ramsey is a wife, homemaker, writer and college student.  She and her husband Joshua will be celebrating their first anniversary this month.  She loves cooking, reading, writing, and spending time with her husband and their family and friends.  Find her on Facebook and on her blog, Living in the Light.