Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Allyson Condie. Allyson taught high school English in Utah and upstate New York. Currently, she is employed by her three little boys who assist her in her secondary career as a writer by taking occasional naps and drawing on manuscripts with red crayon. She is the author of young adult fiction for the national market (Freshman for President) and the LDS market (the Yearbook trilogy). In her spare time, she enjoys running, reading, traveling, and eating. Not cooking. There is a difference.

Back when I was an incurable daydreaming romantic, I wanted a lot of things out of love. Companionship, a soulmate, all of that. I also wanted a song.

You know: the song that you and your significant other choose and refer to forever after as “our song.” My grandmother and grandfather had selected the very lovely “Till the End of Time” as their song, and she once gave him a beautiful inlaid music box that played the melody as a gift. I stood there watching them listen to the music and vowed that someday that would be me.

I wanted something else, too: a book dedication. I swooned over Wallace Stegner’s to his wife Mary in the book Mormon Country: “For Mary, as all of them are.” To inspire that kind of love, to contribute that kind of support, to serve as that kind of muse: heavenly. (I don’t think it hurt that the picture of Wallace on the back of the book was very handsome and brooding.)

When my husband and I started dating, the 90s bubblegum pop era was in full swing. Every time you turned on the radio or went to a dance, that was all you heard. Neither of us were fans. My husband grew up in Seattle during the grunge era, and therefore was a fan of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I grew up in Southern Utah in the we-don’t-have-a-major-radio-station-that-doesn’t-play-country-music so-you-like-what-your-parents-like era, and therefore was a fan of Bruce Springsteen.

Whenever I would request my husband’s opinion about what should be our song, he would tease me by telling me that he thought it was “I Want it That Way” by the Backstreet Boys. That song was everywhere. And he knew it drove me crazy, because it makes absolutely no sense at all (“You are my fire/my one desire/Believe when I say/I want it that way”). What?

I tried in vain to get him to go with “It’s A Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong, but he didn’t think that had enough to do with love. I tried to tell him that “The Promise” by Tracy Chapman would be a good one, since I’d played that song and thought of him while he was on his mission. “But I didn’t know that until I came home and you told me so,” he pointed out. Somehow, we ended up without a song.

At least, I thought, he might still dedicate a book to me. My beloved was an English major. He was very good at writing sonnets. Perhaps a book of poetry would bear an inscription to me. But then, before the ink was dry on our marriage license, he changed his major to economics.

I was 0 for 2 in the romantic dreams realization category. Of course, you know and I know that this doesn’t actually matter. Because the romance isn’t just about “our song” but about the songs you sing to your children and to each other in the dark of the night. It’s not about a dedication on the page of a book but about the dedication you show to one another as people, spouses, human beings who have committed to lift one another up.

One of my clearest memories of time spent with my husband is the time we ran 72 laps around the BYU track. We had been married for about two years and we were training for a marathon together. We needed to run 18 miles that day in order to be prepared for the race. We both had work, he had school, I had coaching, one thing led to another, and soon it was 9:00 p.m. and dark, and we still had not gone on our long run.

The only safe place to go was the track. We took our Gatorade and our watches and we jogged around the first lap. “One,” we said in unison as we crossed the line, and we started to laugh. “This is going to be a long night,” we agreed. Seventy-one laps to go.

We ran as the sky got darker and the stars all came out. We ran while they locked the gates. We ran as couples sneaked into the track and kissed in the bleachers. A couple brought a radio to the darkened infield and started to dance, and when we ran past, they screamed in surprise.

We were still running when they finished dancing.

Things may not always turn out as you picture them in those halcyon days of infatuation and courtship. They may turn out differently. Less perfect. Better.

I don’t have a book dedicated to me, but the dedication of a book I wrote reads like this:

For my husband
who has been my running mate in everything
from marathons to parenting,
and who has taught me that winning isn’t everything–
but that having a good companion is.

And every time we hear a snippet of “I Want It That Way” in the grocery store or on the radio, I start to laugh, because I know what is coming. “That’s our song,” he says, and I have to admit that it is.

-Please share with us your insights on marriage. What is different than you thought it would be? What has surprised you? What hasn’t?

-And, of course, most importantly of all: What truly beautiful/ terrible songs will forever remind you of your dating and courtship?

Related posts:

1. Primary and All Manner of Gnats, Flies, and Frogs
2. Some things just don’t bend the way they used to
3. Little Green Gnome