My wedding anniversary is coming up. Every year midsummer, I think about the vows we made and how we continue to live out those vows. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I think about how we fall short on that.

Military life is nothing new under the sun. While it is, right now, new to our family, many other families have lived this life long before me. And there is comfort in that—knowing I am not alone in feeling trepidation for what comes next, knowing there are others to lean on for support—but also knowing there is ultimate comfort in God because of His concern for our anxiety during this vocational transition.

I’m coming up on one year of marriage and let me tell you—it has been great, but it’s also been hard. We got married during a global pandemic and spent almost our entire first year of marriage in our one-bedroom apartment. We were both working from home and quarantined from friends and family for quite some time, so we were together quite literally all. the. time. There were definite blessings to this—when else would we have gotten to spend this much time together?—but it definitely tested our brand-new marriage.

When my husband eats chips, you likely can hear it in the outback of Australia. We live in Nebraska. And I have that fun condition called misophonia. The sound of chip-chewing is my worst enemy.

There are people in this world who are grammar nuts. It’s their “thing.” They have an uncanny ability to track down a misplaced preposition. They seem to understand the difference between “who” and “whom” with a shocking level of contextual clarity.

I am thankful for these people. I am not one of them.

But I do like words. Words pour out of me easily, whether on the page or in conversation. My husband is a man of much fewer words. I’m almost certain that he keeps his thoughts inside a little treasure box inside his mind. When you get to peek into the box, that’s something really special.

My husband and I have been married for 19.5 years. That .5 is worth noting, based on the shape of our last year.

The truth is, while the lyrics are terrible, Pat Benatar got pretty close—love (in marriage) is a battlefield.

Sometimes I’m not a nice person.

Sometimes I just need to say those words out loud and admit them.