See You In 2011!

It’s been a crazy and wonderful and exhausting year here. Big, huge, enormous. David graduated from law school, took and passed the bar, and was sworn in as a lawyer earlier this month. I grew APW from a hobby to, well, a serious business. We went to Italy. We didn’t get enough sleep. We laughed a lot, we fought a little, and we drank lots of wine. It was a good year, but it was tiring.

And now it’s winding to a close. It’s time for us to rest and renew. To think. To take long walks on the beach together. To see family. To be a family. So I’m closing my computer, and I’m off. We’ll see you back here on January 3, for a year that is sure to be full of more amazing adventures, and hopefully more naps. Till then, may all be calm, all be bright.

xo,
Meg

Wedding Undergraduate: Fighting

Eliza’s super empowering post about fighting seemed like a great way to lead into the holidays, because, lets be honest, is it even possible to make it through the high-stress holidays without a fight or two? (If you can, shhhhh! None of us mere mortals want to hear about it!) I’m blessed with a relationship where we’re comfortable fighting with each other. We have two kinds of fights: the blowing off steam fights, which don’t mean very much, and the really painful moving things forward fights. And the truth is, the world doesn’t have much to say about how amazingly helpful fighting has the potential of being. So without further ado, Eliza, and the power of the fight:

Last night my fiance and I were talking about the year – like a pre-NYE resolution look back, if you will. We do this most years in December, but this year it felt particularly huge. This has been the year we’ve gotten engaged, the year we’ve planned our wedding together. And at the start of the year, it was the year of being pre-engaged. This was a year in which I started a new job, and in which lots of my expectations about my career got turned upside down. 2010 has been a really huge year for us individually, and for our relationship. But what stood out, and what we wound up talking about, were the fights we’d had. Not petty squabbles or spats about being tired or whose way of stacking the dishwasher is the “right way”, but the important stuff.

Over the last four and a half years – but mostly since moving in together two and a half years ago – we have had big fights. We have fought about the way we live in our home. About space, and silence, and how to treat each other in certain situations. About family – our extended families, our birth families, how often we see them and how those occasions should go. We have fought about affection, about sex, about what our wedding should be like, about how it should be organised. (We don’t fight about money, but in this I think we are unusual.) More than anything else, we have fought about communication – how we communicate, what it means, and how we wish it worked, how we want it to work in the future.

And our relationship is freaking AWESOME, you guys. We are incredibly, stupidly happy together. In large part, because those fights? We resolved them. Read More…