Mouse

I'm a Mermaid and the Captain is a Fox. The Captain has a younger sister who is a Mouse.

When the Mouse was thirteen she was in a play of Alice and Wonderland where she played the Dormouse. There was a young man a few years older than her playing the Mad Hatter. The Captain and the Mouse's mother (The Cow since we're going with the critter theme.) likes to tell the story that she saw the Mad Hatter and thought it would be lovely if he would take a liking to the Mouse.

At the end of the last night of the play, when all the actors were standing and shaking hands with the audience, the Hatter approached the Mouse with a big bouquet of flowers.

It basically went like this:

Hatter: Here! Have flowers because they're pretty, like you.

Mouse: Me? =O.O=

Hatter: Yeah! I like you!

Mouse: *Shoves Hatter away* =O.O=

Hatter: O.O

Mouse: Okay =^.^=

And they've been courting ever since. Ok, so it didn't go quite like that, but I'm sure it kind of did.

Meanwhile I was still following the Captain around. I had expected that I would finish High School, go to college, finish college, start a job, and then start a relationship. Then I saw the Mouse walking away with the Hatter following her like she was made of some rare, precious mineral, and a whole herd of girls chasing after the Hatter and I thought “Why can't I have that too?”

Fast forward to today. The Mouse and the Hatter have been courting for around four years and the Captain and I for a little over two. Both couples are planning to get married in either spring or summer of 2013. The Mouse's big plans were to turn eighteen, graduate high school, graduate with a two year degree at college, and get married, all within a couple months of each other.

Married at eighteen! The shock! The Horror! The- ok calm down. First, pause and congratulate her on graduating High School and College at the same time. If you thought anything like shock or horror, or even just a little weirded out, you're probably just a little jealous, like me.

I wish I could have been seriously planning my wedding when I was seventeen. Courting is hard work, especially for the Hatter and me because we found such wonderful people to be utterly devoted to.

When I first started telling people about courting they immediately assumed that we were courting only because we were either not interested in sex, or afraid of it. Then later, when I started having to explain that we do know where babies come from, and know what? We want to get married young because we don't want to wait very long to be together the response was “Well then go do it!”

Is it so wrong to want to get married before having marital relations? There's a very good reason the word Marital is included. You can't “just have sex” you and your “partner” become one flesh (Genesis 2:24.) To be completely honest, I don't believe that a wedding ceremony is what makes you married, I believe sex makes you married, and sex is good only if the two involved have made the commitment to stay together till death do they part.

Not too long ago the Mouse would probably have killed me for talking about her and sex in the same blog entry. (She lubs me though.) Which brings me to the other thing I wanted to talk about.

Probably the best way to make a marriage “work” that I've seen, is for the two involved to be very mature. They have to wake up every day and decide to love their spouse no matter what happens in that day. If, after the Captain and I get married, I found that the Captain poured hot sauce in all the food, stood oars up in all the corners for decoration, told me my writing was terrible, left all his dirty socks all over the house and told me the correct way to wash the dishes, I'd still love him, because I've decided to. (Notice that I didn't mention abuse or adultery.) If he kept it up I'd start to think he didn't love me, but once we make our wedding vows we are bound to each other. There might not be consequences on earth for divorce but I am sure everyone will be held accountable when they meet God face to face. (Just for the record I do believe that there are certain situations where divorce can be acceptable, such as abuse or adultery. Those are very specific situations though.)

To continue to love your spouse you have to give up your selfishness, which is what I mean by maturity. An eighteen year old can be far more mature than a thirty year old if the younger has determined that they are married to be there for their spouse and not for themselves. A thirty year old who has been living on their own for a decade, has a high paying career, and is only interested in marriage so they don't end up completely alone forever, is doomed. The moment it becomes difficult to love their spouse they will leave because the relationship no longer serves them.

This is where the Mouse really comes up. When she and the Hatter started courting she was very young and still very much struggling with her selfish nature. In the time since then I've been completely astounded by how much she has grown up. There was a real turning point where she was asked flatly if she would love the Hatter, and she decided to. This is far more than just having a romantic feeling, she decided to give her heart to him and completely trust him with it. Once she decided that they started working toward getting married, and for them it was the obvious next step. They knew that they had made a commitment to each other and they had already stuck together through plenty of hard times, and the goal was to get married eventually so why not aim to get married as soon as possible?

I'll stop so I don't keep rambling. Suffice it to say that the Mouse and the Hatter might be young, but I think that God has blessed them immensely, and grown them both immensely. It will probably never be smooth sailing, but when the Mouse decides something she makes sure it happens. I'm certain that since they have God's help they'll have a long and happy marriage. Wishing you the best, Mouse.