As the year of COVID continued, I began to listen to a voice deep in my heart that asked, “what if this isn’t the right path?”. Annoyingly, I found this question applied to nearly every part of my life.

At the same time, my boyfriend James and I were talking about getting engaged. We had been dating for nearly ten years – through high school, college, and into the years after we graduated – and engagement felt like the natural next step. We had talked about the idea of getting engaged around our tenth anniversary but, suddenly and inexplicably, the thought of my future being an extension of my present felt suffocating. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t right, despite our long and happy relationship.

I thought we were meant to be together because I had loved him as every version of myself: James was my first crush at just seven years old, and then my first love when we started dating in high school. But, I began to wonder, was the feeling that we were meant to be together simply the feeling of safety that came from loving someone I had known for 3/4 of my life? I wondered, did we really see and appreciate the people we had become? Would we continue to notice and love who we would become in the future? 

The thought of leaving him was the scariest I had ever had, but the idea of betraying my intuition and marrying James despite the way my stomach flipped when I thought about it felt impossible. I worried that this was the feeling described to me by women who said of their divorces, years later: “I knew”.

Here, though, was what I did know: I was the version of myself I loved most in my lifetime – I was so proud of who I had become, and believed so deeply in my worthiness.

While the question of my future partner remained unanswered, I focused instead on defining my own vows to myself. My hope was that the defining relationship in my life would always be my unyielding love for my own soul – everything else would come after that. 

Here were my vows, scribbled in a notebook on one rainy Seattle morning: 

1. I vow to love myself wholly and completely, in every stage of my existence. I will be the fierce defender and caretaker of my own spirit, looking upon my past, present, and future self with love.

2. I vow to listen to what my heart asks of me, and to honor those asks as best I can. I vow to trust my intuition, and do my best to live out my own wisdom, no matter how difficult that is in practice. 

3. I vow to take action to protect my heart and spirit from harm; I will do my best to get out of any situation that makes me feel small, disrespected, or less-than. I will put my own needs above those of others.

4. I vow to listen to my body, to trust its wisdom, and to treat this fleshy vessel as my partner in pursuing the fullest, richest life I can reach. I vow to hold my physical body as beautiful, capable, and worthy of both my trust and respect.

5. I vow to show myself grace for the times I fall short of these vows. I vow to love myself with context and appreciation for the challenges of what it means to be a person.

This was the lens through which I looked at my life and love that year: would my partner see and celebrate the way I had come to know and treasure myself?

This was the hardest installment to write yet, dear ones. It feels so intensely vulnerable to pull back the curtain on this chapter of uncertainty. I want to recognize this feeling for a few reasons:

First, these chapters are why we are sharing our story with you in the first place. As much fun as it is to celebrate the beauty and magic of love, a marriage is so much more than that. At times, I know that a marriage is struggle, it is uncertainty, it is confusion. I hope that stories like these pave the way to pull you into our lives in the moments where we have more questions than answers.

Second, I want to lead with respect for our past partners and relationships. While they ultimately weren’t the right fit for us, Ethan and I have had so many conversations where we have counted ourselves so very lucky to have walked alongside the partners we did on the path that led us to each other.

Thank you for holding these stories (and the many more complicated chapters to come) with grace. It continues to be my honor to share them with you all.