Transcript (Monica): Okay. You ready?

Dawson: Alright, let’s just jump right into it.

Monica: Hi. We’re Monica and Dawson, and we’ve been married for 30... No.

Dawson: Something like 32 days. I was pretty certain that I wanted to pursue that the first week of us dating.

Monica: Yes. And I... That took me longer, to get to that point. Even when we were engaged. I knew I wanted to get married but I still had moments of, “Are we making the right decision?” I think that was my struggle with engagement. I was like... I just don’t like making decisions, ever, and it’s really hard for me. I think it’s a good thing that I struggled, not all the time, but that I was thinking about it. It also is a sign that I understood the gravity of the decision. It wasn’t just whatever.

Dawson: I think for me, I’d always thought about it that, okay, once we’re together and this is somebody who I love and we have the same goal of where we’re heading, then, you know, what’s to wait? We know why we’re doing this and to what end, so we can move towards that together.

Monica: I think when I had struggles it helped to talk to you, but also to other people, like my sister Teresa, because she’d been married for a few years. Because I think people aren’t always super open about the struggles. You hear everyone talk about how excited they are to be engaged, how great their boyfriend is, all of these wonderful things, which are good… and you don’t tell people when things are bad. It’s not something you just put out there. But it can also be hard, because then for me it was like, if I find this hard and nobody else does, then what’s wrong? But then when talking to them it was like, no, actually, everyone has struggles with it. I’m not an outlier.

Dawson: I didn’t know a ton of people. Not many, if any, of my friends are married and I think it was sometimes hard but also kind of beautiful to be the first to breach that wall, to go out into it. It can be hard when people don’t understand.

Monica: When I was having some struggles and we were talking and I asked, like, how you were so certain… I think that’s what I asked you.

Dawson: Something like that.

Monica: And you said, “Because love is a choice, and so I’m choosing to love you.” And I said, “But what if you choose to love the wrong person?” Even now I think about that. I choose to love you and so that means I have to turn off my alarm in the morning sometimes. Okay, I’m working on that one.

Dawson: Once you have those foundational cores of, okay, we have the same end to get each other and the people around us to Heaven, to love God and have that really as the basis and firm foundation of our marriage, then it’s like, okay, then the rest is: how do we do those things? And so I think I realized when, okay, you had that same perspective and those were the core values of your life then it was more of… Okay. Let’s make it happen.