N - Now (Red)

Next month, my wife and I will be celebrating our 5^th wedding anniversary. Our marriage has been a whirlwind of adventure. Let me just list some truths about our relationship story.

• I proposed to Red before I had met her or knew her name. I had never even seen a picture.
• I hacked a state database to learn where she worked so I could send her flowers.
• The time frame between us picking a wedding date and the day of the wedding was 8 days.
• One year later, we vacationed in Turkey the week before their military coup. Ankara got bombed days before we were there. A Syrian refugee searched our car one day for bombs before letting us leave his camp.
• We moved to China 17 months after getting married.
• We now live in Vietnam.
• In the short time we've been together, we have lived in three different countries and visited seven. We've seen both U.S. coasts and much of the country in between.

Life has been busy and it has been great, but months ago someone asked me a question that still rattles around in my head.

 "Weren't you concerned that moving to another country might be too much strain for a couple so recently married?"

It was a legitimate question. Moving twelve time zones away to a foreign land is immensely stressful and scary and technically we were still a new couple. But I don't remember being worried about that.

We were honest with ourselves and each other during the moving process. We knew there would be some huge challenges once we got there and we recognized that we didn't even know what those challenges were going to be. We also knew that one of our biggest strengths as a couple is our ability to communicate. We talk to each other.

I mean really talk.

I was concerned about the stress of the move and the adjustments that would be required, but I was not concerned about how it would affect our relationship. I think it goes back to how we started dating.

Red and I met online through each other's blogs. I'm not going to tell the whole story here, but innocent conversations online grew into more. This gave us a chance to get to know each other outside of looking for romance. When the possibility of a relationship began to grow, we threw some hard truths at each other. We even had a 'red flag' conversation. On that phone call, we each admitted things about ourselves that would make us look bad. (For me: I rarely hold a job more than a year, I had two ex-wives, etc)

We candidly stated our stances on social, political and religious issues. We explained how we felt about kids, finances, ethics, family traditions and much more. We just put it all on the line.

We talked in depth about all the things that a lot of couples don't get into for years. I believe we both knew this relationship had the potential to go somewhere and it just needed to all be out in the open. We didn't want to waste each other's time if there was something one of us would not be able to live with. Why wait years to learn something and then break up?

This also caused us to call each other out on some bad communication habits we had each picked up over the years. For myself, she quickly corrected how I respond to questions when I don't appreciate the direction of a conversation. With some honest self-reflection and looking back at how this practice had not been helpful in my last marriage, I was able to change it.

This is just one of the ways that being in this woman's presence has made me a better person.

All of this is also why I was not worried about how we as a couple would handle our big move to China. We had each other's backs and knew that.

I am so in love with my wife and look forward to where the next five years will take us.

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This month, I am participating in the A to Z Challenge. Each day this month, people around the world are writing blog posts and working their way through the alphabet. Each person decides their own personal theme. I am writing about people who have affected my life.