Last week’s blog, Accidentally In Love, was my romantic love story with my new husband, Bryan.
People ate it up, and it is clear to me that lots of people are in the market for a love story.
This week I decided to go a step farther and share a glimpse of our romance from Bryan’s point of view, two months after we met. I have permission to share his journal entry, enjoy:
From Bryan Chaney October 2015
It has been almost two months since Charlotte and I have met. In my past relationships, this is usually where the infatuation starts wearing off and you start to get to know the other person; you see their faults and red flags. This one is clearly different. I am passionately in love with this woman on all levels. Every time I talk to her or am with her, I find yet another reason to love her. It’s like peeling back the layers of the onion, but with each new layer, the tears in my eyes caused by the onion are tears of joy in discovering yet another angle to pour more love into her. I’m totally physically attracted to her, when she just walks by me or touches me with her hand, I’m immediately ripped away from whatever I was thinking about or doing and focus on her, hence, why I nickname her “squirrel.” Even without that, I find myself longing to see another text from her, wanting to hear her voice (over facetime HD audio because it’s so clear), praying with her, hearing her infectious laugh, seeing yet another song from her BC playlist, a selfie…just can’t get her out of my mind.
We talk or pray about three times a day, sometimes more, text ALL day. We talk about what we will do when we are married, about our holidays with eight kids, how we’ll handle our differences (if we find any). We even called my real estate friend in Frederick to start looking for a house. And no, I mean NO red flags with her. Well except for her totally errant opinion on the health risks of using the microwave oven….
We are both convinced that our 23 year very difficult marriages were God’s character-building walk-in-the-valley to prepare us for each other and the ministry He is calling us to. Even our differences will serve to complement each other for His glory and to increase our effectiveness. We both crave and respond to encouragement, something that is causing us both to bloom. Even people who we would expect to receive criticism from are supporting us even, at this early stage.
I’m kind of surprised at women’s reaction when I tell them about our purity pledge.
It brings some almost to tears. It’s like there’s some craving for respect and gentlemanship that is embedded in their soul. Guys, on the other hand, are like, “huh. Good luck with that”. The world clearly needs another way to do this adult dating thing; we will do it.
It is also a surprise to me how much fun we can have even with the purity boundary.
I also removed a lot of pictures from my FB that showed me with other women, one on one. Charlotte did not ask me to do this, but she told me she was looking at them, and that can’t be fun. She removed similar pictures from her FB. I looked at my page like, does this look like the page of a married man? It did not, so I made it right. Small sacrifice for this beautiful woman. I can’t wait to flood FB with pictures of Charlotte and me, and change that relationship status to “engaged,” then “married.”
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Love it! I’m SO GLAD for you two! Marriage the way it should have always been! 🙂
Thank you. God is so good. So happy for you too friend.