Marriage Challenge - Step 1

It's time for the marriage challenge to begin. Here is the 1st step -

Post Pictures from your dating days (or tell all about it!). Think about one thing you used to do or have as a couple that you have lost in the shuffle of life. How can you regain it?

Jon and I met our sophomore year in high school. We were both new students at Ouachita Hills Academy that year. I first noticed Jon because of his blond curls and blue eyes. He was VERY cute. =)

But later I became more interested in him as a person. He was quiet and didn't talk very much (unlike me) so it was a perfect fit. He was very smart and seemed to have a maturity about him that the other guys at the school did not have. It was so easy to talk to him and because our school did not allow dating we became really good friends first. My parents thought he was the coolest kid in the school and told me "if you have to like someone here you should like that Jon Murrell guy."
Thankfully this didn't make me lose interest. =)

 

By the second year of school we had figured out that we were attracted to each other.
We secretly began dating. 

Jon informed me on a camping trip our families had both arranged our senior year that he was going to marry me some day. I told him yes, but he'd have to ask me properly someday. =) 

It was hard to hide our love and we were found out. After quite a bit of discipline and lots of stress we graduated and began dating in earnest.

Immediately following graduation.

 

 

Jon was an amazing boyfriend. He had received a scholarship to Arkansas Tech. After class on Friday he would drive the 6 hours to my house in TN arriving late at night or even early on Saturday morning. Then on Sunday afternoon he would head home.

 

 We wrote often and talked to each other every night on the phone. 

In March of 1996 Jon asked my dad if he could marry me. Daddy agreed.

My family had all gone on vacation and I had stayed at home to finish with the last of my classes. I was lonely and talking to Jon on the phone. We had planned a December wedding and I had even ordered the invitations. Jon convinced me that instead of getting a job for 3 months after my graduation that we should move the wedding up to September 1, 1996. We would have been officially dating for 3 1/2 years by then. I made some phone calls, rearranged some wedding plans and hand wrote a new date on the wedding invitations (very rednecky =) Is that a word?). 

A week before the wedding I was at his parents home with him so we could finalize wedding plans and have a bit of alone time before the wedding day came. We went for a walk and we talked about how hard it would be for us with me starting a new job and him still in school. We were young - 19 years old. But it seems worth it to be able to see each other every day. On the way back to his house he stopped to pick a flower by the road and asked me to marry him. Of course, I said yes.

The week before the wedding.

So on September 1, 1996 Jon and I were married.