Our Love Story: From a Childhood Crush to Forever

I’ve started and stopped this story more times than I can count.

For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why it was so hard to write and then I realized it’s because every time I try, I’m trying to put words to something that feels far bigger than me. When I look back at how my husband and I found our way to each other, I don’t just see coincidence. I see God’s hand, guiding both of us through years of detours and heartbreak until we finally landed exactly where we were always meant to be.

So I’ll just tell it the way it happened, the small details and all, because the small details are the whole point.

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A Childhood Crush

I was thirteen years old the first time I met the man who would one day become my husband.

I know how it sounds. But from the moment I met Michael, I was smitten in that all-consuming, write-his-last-name-after-my-first-name way that only a thirteen-year-old can be. He was on his high school wrestling team, and my mom chaperoned one of the female wrestlers … which meant I got to tag along to tournaments nearly every weekend. For a girl with a crush that big, it was a dream.

What I remember most, though, isn’t the crush. It’s his character. Even as a teenager, Michael had a steadiness about him. The kind of values and integrity most people don’t grow into until much later, if ever. I watched him sit with all of us at the hospital when one of the wrestlers got hurt, cracking jokes to put smiles on our worried faces. When a pillow fight went sideways and I got the worst of it, he was the first to notice and make sure I was okay. I could fill a book with little moments like that. I may have only been thirteen, but I already knew I wanted to marry a man like him someday.

I just never imagined it would be him.

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The Years In Between

I tried to hold onto our friendship, but life had other plans. My mom stopped chaperoning, Michael graduated, and slowly we drifted. For one brief stretch he worked at the McDonald’s near my house, and I’ll confess I bought breakfast there nearly every morning just to say hi … most of which I never even ate. I wasn’t being dramatic; I just missed my friend.

Then my mom came home one day with news: we were moving. Not down the road, across the country, from Florida to Seattle. I spent my last two years of high school bouncing between three different schools, and somewhere in all that upheaval, I lost touch with Michael completely. We’d never been more than friends … a four-year age gap is a canyon at that age … but it still broke my heart a little.

Life kept moving. I graduated and joined the Army National Guard. Six months after finishing Basic Training and AIT, I deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom. I served fifteen months overseas, and when I came home to Florida, I came home carrying something I didn’t yet have a name for: PTSD. (That’s a story for another day, and one I share more about in my writing on PTSD and combat trauma.)

Then came Black Friday, 2005.

I was standing in line at Walmart with my step-dad, the usual holiday chaos all around us, when who ends up in line right behind me but Michael and his dad. My heart did exactly what you’d expect. He looked just the same. And then I saw it … a wedding ring.

I won’t pretend my heart didn’t sink. But the gentleman he’s always been, he made sure I got the laptop I’d come for before we went our separate ways. Standing in that store, I made myself a quiet promise: I would marry a man like Michael. I didn’t have the best examples of marriage growing up, and by then I was no longer in contact with my biological father (something I’ve written about in I Forgive You). But I knew, deep down, the kind of man I was looking for. I just assumed it would have to be someone else.

In the years that followed, I went through my share of bad relationships; being cheated on, enduring verbal abuse, brushing up against worse. I even said yes to a proposal once. But every single time, somewhere in the middle of it, I’d find myself returning to the qualities I’d admired in Michael all those years ago. Not comparing, exactly, just remembering what I actually wanted. And every time, that clarity gave me the strength to walk away from what wasn’t right.

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Finding Our Way Back

In 2010, my enlistment was coming to an end and I made the hard decision to leave the military. Not long after, I started a job at the college in my town. And one ordinary day, sitting among my coworkers, something just told me to look him up.

I found Michael on Facebook and this time, there was no wife. No mention of a relationship at all. So I took a breath and sent this exact message: “Hey, not sure if you remember me, but I used to travel with the wrestling team. How are you doing?”

Pretty bold, if I do say so myself.

He wrote back, and that one message turned into two solid months of emails flying back and forth. This was before all the texting apps, so email it was. I learned he was no longer married and was currently deployed. We stayed up late typing out our whole lives to each other, getting to know the people we’d each become.

And then, I’ll be honest, I got scared. For the last stretch of his deployment, I gave him the cold shoulder. I’d reconnected with an ex and convinced myself I should give that another try which was probably the worst decision I could have made. But God’s timing is something I’ll never stop marveling at, because the very day I finally ended things with that ex (literally an hour later) an email from Michael landed in my inbox. He was home on leave, and he wanted to catch up.

In that moment, I knew exactly where I belonged. I wrote back and told him I would love to.

One first date and one week later, we were sitting in his car outside his family’s house before his welcome-home gathering, and he turned to me and asked:

“How should I introduce you?”

“How do you want to introduce me?”

“As my girlfriend.”

“Sounds good to me.”

From that moment on, it’s been the two of us.

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Becoming Part of His Family

That day in the car was the thing I’d waited my whole life for. People always say you’ll “just know” when you’ve found the right one, and I’d clung to that promise, refusing to settle until I felt it. Sitting there as he asked to call me his girlfriend, I finally did.

To a lot of people, my own family included, it all looked impossibly fast. We’d both just ended other relationships. We were supposed to take time for ourselves. Thank God we didn’t listen.

We walked into his family’s house and he introduced me, and I have never felt so instantly welcomed. I was a bundle of nerves until his grandfather, a man I came to love dearly, broke the ice the only way he knew how:

“Hey grandpa, this is my girlfriend, Christina.”

“Well, I sure wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”

I think the whole family laughed for a solid ten minutes. Just like that, I belonged.

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Long Distance and Leaps of Faith

His leave ended and he headed back to his base in Georgia, four hours from me. We were determined, so we made a deal: every other weekend, taking turns driving. By April of 2010, my life was a back-and-forth between Florida and Georgia. The drive was long, but he was worth every mile.

We fell into it fast and easy, saying I love you, talking about forever. The plan was for me to move up to Georgia that fall, after he finished a month of training in Alabama. I was excited. We had it all mapped out.

And then, one dreadful day in June, I got called into HR at the college and told my position was being eliminated. I was devastated! I’d never lost a job in my life. I packed my things in tears and called Michael before I’d even left the parking lot. Without a second of hesitation, he said, “Why are you crying? That’s not a bad thing. Now you can move up here sooner.”

If that’s not God at work, I don’t know what is.

Within days, I’d packed up and headed to Georgia. The job search there was brutal. Dozens of applications, not a single interview, and I was not someone built to sit still on unemployment. By August, still without work, it was time for him to leave for his thirty days of training, and I didn’t want to ride it out alone. So I went back to Florida to stay with my parents.

But after those first months of building a life together, being apart again was miserable for both of us. When we learned his training room was private, the decision made itself: I packed up and drove to Alabama to be with him. I had nothing holding me in place. Still no job despite my best efforts, and my college courses were online. Being together was the easy choice.

That training was grueling and took everything out of him, but I was so glad to be there for it. He was working toward becoming an instructor for the Air Force’s Airman Leadership School, and watching him study late into the night, building his teaching materials with that same work ethic and integrity I’d admired since I was thirteen … I fell even more in love with him.

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In Sickness and In Health

When training ended, we headed back to Georgia, and things finally started clicking into place. I landed a year-long position at a college just down the road from our house. We were settling into our life, already talking about marriage. Then, in October 2010, we found out we were pregnant.

Suddenly the path was crystal clear to both of us. It was time to build the family we both wanted so badly.

On November 27, 2010, we stood barefoot on a beach in Florida, surrounded by our closest family and a few friends, and said I do. It was perfect. We were married, with a baby on the way. I didn’t think life could get any fuller.

And then, a dreadful day that December, we sat in a small room at the doctor’s office and were told our baby no longer had a heartbeat.

Our world came apart. We didn’t know how to hold something that heavy. But even in that little room, one thing was clear: we had each other, and we would get through it together. That baby never took a breath in this world, but he or she was born into our hearts all the same and we both hold tight to the belief that we’ll meet our child again one day in heaven.

It took time. Grief like that doesn’t lift on a schedule. But we held on, and we moved forward together, and looking back I can see how that valley became the bedrock of our marriage. We’d been married less than a month when we walked through a tragedy, and instead of breaking us, it bound us. It showed us both, right at the very start, exactly what in sickness and in health really means.

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Fifteen Years Later

That little room at the doctor’s office feels like a lifetime ago now.

Fifteen years of marriage, sixteen together, and so much life has happened since. We went on to have two daughters, now fourteen and almost thirteen, who fill our home with noise and laughter and the occasional teenage eye-roll. They know about the sibling they never got to meet, and they carry that little one in their hearts the same way we do, holding to the same belief that one day, in God’s presence, our whole family will be together. There’s something profoundly tender about watching your children love someone they never had the chance to hold.

Not long ago, Michael retired after twenty-four years of service. Twenty-four years of being the same steady, principled man I first noticed across a wrestling tournament when I was thirteen years old. The uniform is hung up now, but the character underneath it never changed.

If you asked me what’s carried us through all these years, I could give you the easy answer … that we were always meant to be, that God wrote this story from the start. And I do believe He did. But the truer answer is less fairy tale and more the good kind of work.

I’ve done a lot of healing in our years together, and Michael has met every bit of it with grace. He’s been patient with my PTSD, gentle with the wounds I carried into our marriage, and steady on the days I couldn’t be. He never once asked me to be further along than I was. That kind of grace changes a person. It’s a great deal of why I’ve been able to heal at all.

And the hard seasons? They haven’t broken us. They’ve built us. Every deployment, every move, every loss, every stretch where life demanded more than we thought we had. We came out the other side a little more us. I’ve stopped dreading the hard seasons, because I’ve learned what they do: they make us stronger.

Underneath all of it is the thing I’d tell any couple who asked. Communication is everything. It’s the pillar our whole marriage stands on. We talk — really talk — through the good and the hard, and we don’t let things fester in the silence. Add the faith we share, and we have a foundation that has held through absolutely everything.

There’s one decision Michael and I made early and have never wavered on: we put each other first, and our girls second. That order matters more than it might sound. We love our daughters more than life itself and prioritizing our marriage is loving them, because the greatest gift we can give them is the daily example of a healthy, loving relationship between their parents. We’ve built a close, connected little family of four, and we protect that bond fiercely, even ahead of extended family. Our girls have grown up watching two people choose each other, communicate openly, and lead with love and it shows in how they connect with everyone, inside our home and out in the world.

I don’t have words big enough for how grateful I am to call this man my husband. The childhood crush I never dreamed I’d actually marry became the steady love of my life. My partner through every battlefield and every boundary, the father of my children, and the proof that God knew exactly what He was doing all along.

Sixteen years in, I would choose him again in a heartbeat. Every single time.

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NOTE: This post combines and updates “Our Love Story – Part 1” (August 2017) and “Our Love Story – Part 2” (October 2017) into a single story, rewritten in my current voice.