Two
He said "I want to marry you and live as two"
I said I wanted to do that too
Others sneered at what we proposed to do
They said we would never last as two
They said you think it's fun when it's brand new
But love will fade when you become more than two
We were still pretty young when we two became three
We were often too tired, but we were still happy
Four years later, we added one more
Going from a family of two to a family of four
Others said we couldn't last too much longer
To their surprise, our love just got stronger
Three years later, we brought home number five
They said for sure we two would no longer survive
We two have been strong now for thirty-two years
Countering the infinite, bleak predictions of our peers
~Sadie~
Note:
When my husband and I got married, we were pretty well fresh out of high school. He was eighteen, and I had recently turned nineteen. We had a lot of relatives (mostly mine) as well as some so called "friends" saying repeatedly that young romances didn't last. They gave us five years at the most. They made a lot of interesting predictions that he would cheat on me, because, apparently, no young man can go without inserting his manhood into any available orifice.
These predictions became even more prolific when I gave birth to our first daughter at the age of twenty-one. My husband was a very devoted father. He enjoyed spending time with his child. Some of his friends liked to brag about their party exploits to show him what he was missing out on, but he never thought he was missing out on much. My husband is not that much of a drinker. He likes a couple of beers while watching a football game. On a few occasions I've seen him a bit tipsy, but he doesn't like to get full-on, stumbling drunk--never has.
These predictions of doom continued through the births of our second and third daughters. After the birth of our youngest, there were also predictions that my husband might turn into King Henry the Eighth out of disgust that I hadn't managed to produce a male heir. He set straight those who suggested that he was upset with me for having only daughters by educating them on the fact that it was actually his chromosome that determined the sex of our offspring.
We can't entirely distance ourselves from the negative relatives, but we don't see them that often. We did distance ourselves from the negative friends, who thought we were boring stick-in-the-muds anyway. I'd rather be a stick-in-the-mud than a doomsayer. It's one thing to express concern about a couple getting married at a very young age, it's quite another to continually predict that their romance will end in despair.
