On Saturday Brad and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary.  As we sat at our dining room table listening to endless knock-knock jokes, trying to persuade Maddux to eat his green beans and once again cutting Paizlee’s food into teensy pieces, we smiled exhaustedly at one another and toasted our plastic glasses of lemonade.

Six years ago I had just graduated from college. Brad and I had been doing the long distance relationship thing for a few years and I was over it. I had spent three gazillion dollars on plane tickets and I knew that if I was going to get a fresh start as a college graduate, I wanted my fresh start to involve living in the same zip code as Brad. This resulted in the most unplanned and best wedding ever. There was no dress. No flowers. Actually, no official wedding, in the traditional sense. We showed up at the courthouse in the middle of nowhere Tennessee at 1:15pm on a Friday and walked out at 1:33pm as a married couple. It was glorious. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

We were married by a man named Boo. I couldn’t even possibly make that up. He was wearing overalls that were splattered with oil because, naturally, he had changed the oil in his truck on his lunch break. Of course. We had no witness, so some random man that was pulled in from the hallway was our witness. That poor man cried throughout the whole thing. We, on the other hand, pretty much giggled the entire time. It just seemed so surreal. I wore my favorite khaki skirt from the Gap and that cool necklace that I bought in Berlin. He rocked out in his burgundy button-up shirt. We just could not stop smiling at each other. Except for the random man/witness blowing his nose excessively into his handkerchief, it was perfect.

In one week I left Ann Arbor, got a new job, bought a car, got married and moved into our very first apartment.

Brad and I often talk about that first apartment. Looking back we can see just how awful it was, but at the time we absolutely didn’t see it. We somehow looked past the armies of spiders that lived in the bathroom, the fact that our bathroom sink was actually in the bedroom and the creepy unidentifiable stains on the carpet. What we do remember is that first Valentine’s Day when I broiled steaks and set off all the smoke detectors, staying in bed all day Sunday to read the paper and watch football and all of the car picnics that Brad would bring to me while I worked days and he worked nights. We had no money. We had no clue how tough life could really be. But we had peanut butter sandwiches and we had each other.

Three children, four vehicles, six promotions, four apartments and two houses later, here we are. He makes me laugh. He calls on his way home from work and busts out into his best Stevie Wonder impression while singing, “I just called to say I love you.” He does this awful, and I mean awful, robot dance thing that he has taught the children to do as well. He tickles me until I am sure that I am going to die, and he isn’t ticklish at all, which is totally unfair. And then there is this terrible Forrest Gump impression. Oh, it’s bad. And wonderful.

That is my very sentimental take this week. What’s yours? What’s your love story?