I've been married for a minute. I just didn't feel the need to tell you.

I legally married my wife in February of 2023. We had been talking about getting married a full year before we legally sealed the deal. As of June 2023, we are reaching our sixth month in couples therapy. We just recently celebrated this past May.

I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

For the first year of our relationship we were open. You can hear our budding thoughts on each other and on nonmonagamy here. In the beginning it was important for us to feel supported by each other as we navigated past lovers, dated situationships, and potential life changes. We quickly fell in love (like within 3 days) and yet we didn’t feel like it was appropriate to drop all of our individual goals and plans to pursue our budding relationship. While the love that was on the horizon felt good and made us want to explore more, neither of us were in a space to stop focusing on school, careers, and growing into being independent semi functioning adults. We took everything (but displaying our love for each other) nice and slow. It was beautiful. To learn more and more about someone because they want to be vulnerable with you. Because they are pushing themselves to be seen fully by their crush. And then actually accepting you once they’ve seen it all - that’s the hard part.

Our second year was spent settling into our reality of actually being a couple. We still chose to live apart as we still had taxing school and job responsibilities. We started to argue and disagree about very real things for the first time. And to my surprise, we were getting better and better at communicating our feelings to one another. We both continued our therapy sessions individually and worked towards discussing moving in together. Our dates continued. Our trips became more fun and I began to picture an actual future with my wife. I could see us raising our pets together, supporting one another through grief, starting a community space together, traveling the world, and continuing to love each other’s company. Our disagreements were always real and deep and intimate. But the repair was just the same. We learned to work through our problems while having grace for one another. We learned to love each other for our flaws - and when to let go. With all of this in mind we both decided in the Summer of 2022: let’s get married.

First, we wanted to work on celebrating one another and offering grace to ourselves. Both of our therapists felt two overachievers had found each other and particularly found something else to put our energy into. So we said let’s have an engagement trip! We could skip the bending on a knee and buying a ring and just agree to be engaged. We had this silly little idea: Let’s try (if we can) to actually relax. Thankfully we had a long minute to plan our trip. We weren’t going to have any time or energy or money until after we moved in together anyway to start planning so we decided to have a special dinner date first. Huge trip to commemorate our decision to be together, second! It wasn’t until Christmas/New Years that we were able to actually head to California and announce our impending nuptials for 2023.

A month after our trip while editing my wife and I’s very late engagement photo announcement we decided: let’s just legally get married now. So we did. By the time we got a Zoom invite court date we were well into Black History Month. In less than 15 minutes it was done - we were married and on to the next. Once again we decided to celebrate privately at Chili’s. We decided to tell very few friends. We were settled on not celebrating until we boh finished school and had some years to save up. However both of our mothers felt it would be best if we celebrated at least once in 2023 with a group of family and friends. And so we did.

So if you didn't already know: We’ve been married for a while now, we just didn’t feel the need to tell y’all till now. Our marriage is between us. We wanted it to be just for us. I’ll never regret keeping my marriage on the low - it’s been beautiful getting to enjoy it with my wife. We have no plans to ever have a ceremony or a formal reception. Hey, maybe 30 years from now we will throw a huge cookout…only time will tell I guess.

In the meantime just know that we are happy. That we don’t regret a second of our story. And we wouldn’t have had it any other way. Thank you to everyone who has congratulated my beautiful wife and I. I’m happy you all get to see how happy we are. We deserve it.