By Emily

The saying goes, "friends come and go, but family is forever" but I don't believe it, because I just married my best friend, so now my friend is forever.

I'm in the mood to write, so this post is a present for, not just Brigham, but all the friends who are true friends to me, and seem to be have a permanent residence in my heart despite years, or states, apart. I am so blessed with amazing, loving friends. Since I am now in Boston, and my life consists of working from 7am until 7pm, making dinner for my husband, running errands and chilling out at home, I'll give myself the liberty to expound on this sentiment strictly because I feel like it. I miss you all dearly, but I am also excited to make new friends!

FRIENDSHIP. (not quite)

In the last few years, I have had moments of losing touch with who I really am. It's fairly easy to drift into the lowest common denominator so that everyone around you can be happy, all the necessary things get done, to dilute your true self into having minimal, simplistic feelings, to not ripple feathers, or cause rage.

I once knew someone who, when I asked "how do you show your love for the people you love?", replied quite profoundly, "I show up." Then this person disappeared, or in other words, never showed up. What a failure! I have known many people like this throughout my years of making friends, who have come and gone, and as a result, have left a residue of weirdness in my memories that only forgiveness or forgetfulness can wipe clean, because there was no real bond of friendship.

I once met another "friend" on my trip to England, who I met in a youth hostel that I stayed at, who not only was from California, a world away, but also went to the same university as me. We hung out that day with some french girls traveling the city, and then the four of us went our separate ways. Coincidentally, the next time I saw that person, I was in the library of Cal State Long Beach, and though we were clearly in the library not doing much but goofing off on the computers, he suddenly became really busy and took off shortly after saying hello. I felt that behavior was rather erratic, considering the jolly memory of our ventures abroad, but then, I realized a valuable lesson almost immediately. True friends always feel warm and radiant in times of reunions, and false friends, or shallow people, can't or don't want to duplicate the feeling.

LOVE. TRUE LOVE.

Although these stories seem tangential, they're not. I am merely separating the wheat from the tares, metaphorically speaking. If marriage is the fruit of love, then friendship is the seed. If there is one thing that Brigham has taught me in the short month that we have been married (1 month and 1 week today), it is that it really is profoundly refreshing to be in the constant company of a true friend, one who I can be completely unruly toward (thank you birth control), and have complete confidence will still love me anyway, because for years I directly (though not purposely) observed him to joyfully be a true friend to anyone and everyone in his path of life.

Just being with him every day amplifies the joy of living in the comfort of my own skin, and I cannot even begin to describe how wonderful and weightless I feel about it. Thankfully, my wildest, most remote and almost abandoned dreams have, in fact, come completely true- though I will emphasize, not without exceedingly difficult trials. But all trials turn into blessings if we let them. In our little Welch family, there is no judgment, no awkwardness, and no lack of acceptance for my imperfections or his, which are not even attempted to be hidden. I can happily live up to my life's saying (which I got from Stacy, my BFF) that, "I'm pretty sure God made me on purpose..." and so does he, and then we just roll with it, love, rage and all. I finally feel like the real 'me' is back, and to me, this is what I always imagined a real marriage, and a real family to feel like. I just had to wait for it.