Aaron and I started our scandal about six years back. I was seasoning a growing list of heartaches and moving back to the Tennessee basin. And he—well, he was Aaron Andersen. It was October, my sister had married his brother, and we left their celebratory evening together to go sober up in front of his pot-bellied stove at Greystone. I had hiccupped in front of my parents and left them to watch us go down that gravel drive and into our newly carved history.

His home was in Nashville and I had three semesters left in Chattanooga. I remember late–night and early morning drives on I-24 to make it back for class. It was during this stretch that I hit my Chattanooga-Nashville record time. He would swing through on weekends on his way down to the drop zone outside of Atlanta. A couple of months in, he whispered “I love you” into my half-asleep ear and drove off to jump out of a plane. Ugh. I already loved him.

Things went complicated from there. After we realized we truly liked each other, we started trying to get away—and in the most acute and galling ways. I mean, I didn’t mean to fall for Aaron Andersen—um, no. I moved to Nashville, got a job, and tried to make sense of my trajectory.  After a weekend in San Francisco with my friend Lien, I came home grumpy and still set on moving out of Greystone. A box of pregnancy tests, a glass of wine, and dinner at J. Alexander’s just made things feel wobbly and sketchier than ever. We’ve been through waves, over and under. Sometimes I like to romanticize our journey and think of it as Over the Rhine’s Drunkard’s Prayer, but we were unfiltered and impure. And selfish—a brutally charred selfishness pervaded everything between me and Aaron. 

I don’t want to belittle the unattractive parts of our story, because we endured them and we now understand how to hurt each other good and choose not to. But our history gets better. We have a fantastic son, nearly three now—Raines Wilder. His birth did not save us; it did not fix us. In fact, the first year of the boy’s life seemed the loneliest and most hopeless of all my memory. Raines Wilder is, however, the most redemptive representation of our love for each other. This kid… seriously. We haven’t been able to lean on mushy, fleeting “love”—we fell to our deaths high on this. I decided. He decided. And it helps some kinda crazy that we really like who each other is. 

So here we are working out our love for one another (all three of us) in a lovely home in grand Nashville, surrounded by products of my love’s creativity and skills. It was the end of June, we were driving through some beautiful states on our way home from the Outer Banks, and we decided. We decided to text Josh (A’s brother, my brother-in-law) and ask him to “marry us”—he said “Yeah, yeah, for cheap.” A couple weeks later there we were on a cliffside of Lake Superior in Marquette, promising ourselves unto each other.

So here’s to conscientious love gracing two broken humans:

I promise to love you through every season of our lives.

I promise to guard our marriage in hope and loyalty.

I promise to keep you and our family a priority.

I promise to respect and trust you as we continue to forge our life together.

I promise to protect our friendship with grace and forgiveness.

I promise to support you in kindness and with a vulnerable heart.

I promise to love you for the rest of my life.

Photos: Jesse Cusic