I was one of those shy guys who always got picked last in football. A bookworm with lots of female friends, but not many girlfriends.
About eight years ago, when I ended my first and until then only serious relationship, I thought I’d never get married. I was almost right – I spent the next four years on my own, without much hope of a happy outcome to my love life.
My friend, who had been through a considerable number of girlfriends, comforted me by saying that I would actually be the first among us to get married and find the love of my life very quickly – that’s how it usually goes with people who’ve had few relationships. I didn’t believe him at the time. Today I know he was right.
Four years ago I got married, after less than a year of being together – and now we have Sofia, who has just turned one!
During those four years of solitude, I was learning patience, determined not to miss the love of my life the way it had happened to many of my friends who were popular and adored by girls – and who may have lost the right one in all that commotion. I only understood that recently, of course!
Step by step, we walk through life together.
The Habit Called Love
The love of my life entered my life so gently – and exactly when I least expected it, somehow also exactly when I’d truly relaxed!
She came at the right time and made me a better person…
Before Mima, I never longed for marriage, not even in my dreams – I thought I was too young for something like that. But then, at 23, I felt almost immediately that I wanted to step into this uncertain certainty. Until then I hadn’t been a traditionalist when it came to marriage, because people who matter greatly to me had very painful experiences with it – but the heart said what it said.
At that time, four years ago, my wife and I had to first get used to each other after the wedding. After a long-distance relationship (her in Serbia, me in Germany) and visits that were intense but brief, we suddenly found ourselves in a shared life in a foreign country, both studying in a foreign language – which was quite stressful for both of us.
That adjustment – to each other, to a foreign country and culture, to university life – didn’t always go smoothly. But once we’d built shared habits, shared goals, a shared daily rhythm, once we’d arranged our apartment piece by piece together, everything became so much easier. A great help was certainly the fact that we both had similar problems and were much more reliant on each other, because our parents and friends were far away.
Today I can understand what our grandmothers used to say: “I barely knew him when we married – but I grew to love him over time.” Of course we got married because we loved each other – but if you don’t work on creating shared goals and habits, love alone eventually becomes insufficient.
I believe that for our grandmothers who married “blind,” love was born precisely from that shared breathing. It’s sometimes genuinely hard for me to explain to people how strange and difficult it feels when I’m separated from my wife for a longer or unplanned period (and now from Sofia too) – because they’re simply part of every second of my daily life and my sweet habit.
When Is the Right Time to Start a Family?
One of the things – and it’s not such a small one – that my wife and I couldn’t immediately agree on was when to welcome a new member to our family. Mima didn’t want to give birth in her later years, when every pregnancy carries more risk. I, on the other hand, wanted to finish my degree and get on my own two feet financially first, and then have children.
But talking it through with Mima, I realised that our financial situation wouldn’t change significantly over the next five years – because we both want to do a PhD after our Master’s degrees, and by the time we were finishing our dissertations we’d already be well into our thirties and looking for new reasons to put off having a baby. Over time, that “paternal and maternal instinct” also made itself felt – and we decided not to let that magical moment slip away, and threw ourselves into the new adventure.
We’ve met so many people who spent most of their lives waiting for better conditions for a baby – and now have neither the better conditions nor the baby!
When it comes to a relationship or a marriage, you have to always move forward and make small steps – because when you stand still, like a half-built house, you slowly at first and then increasingly rapidly crumble in on yourself and get overgrown with weeds.
We didn’t want to wait for ideal circumstances to appear – because circumstances are never ideal!
We didn’t want to travel everywhere, try everything, or as people say in our part of the world: “live it all”, before expanding the family – because we understood that we can “live it all” with a baby too. And beautifully at that!
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