Mason and Joy,

You two are infinitely lucky to have found each other; the two of you together are almost as lucky as Mason solely is to have found a woman who can deal with having a boy who takes longer to get ready than she does. You'd think a man with no hair could shit, shower, and shave in about twenty minutes rather than two hours.

But I digress.

You guys have a lot of good things in front of you, whether it's making your home together, learning every minute detail about the other, having children, cooking meals together, or whatever it is that you're most excited about. These things make daily life worth living. Remember every day that you are each special and perfect in your flaws and that you each make up half of a team that will best succeed if you always try to work together.

Now, for the part of this letter that falls into the "reality" category.

You are going to piss each other off SO BAD. There will be days that you would rather bash yourselves in the face with a large, wooden meat tenderizer than to speak to each other for another moment. This marriage stuff gets difficult and confusing and excruciating at times. What I hope is that you guys are able to persevere, able to remember why you felt like you couldn't live another day without being married to each other, able to remember all the little things about each other that make you smile.

And, really, I don't have any special, secret, married person advice for you guys that you couldn't figure out for yourselves or read in a fortune cookie. What I have learned is that every day is different, and sometimes it's hard to stay on the same page. There are days when I have thought "WHAT have I gotten myself into?", days when I've thought "HOW can one man eat so many bags of lime tortilla chips?', days when I've thought "If I can just bang my head up against this shovel ten or fifteen more times, maybe I can knock myself out." It is fun and exciting and scary and very, very hard to live with another person, especially when it's NOT a roommate situation in which you can just keep thinking, "At least this year will be over soon." It's FOREVER and ever and ever and ever, which means you don't have any easy outs. You have to work and work and work, and learn how to let things go quickly and thoroughly, how to balance out the other's flaws with your strengths, and how to let the other balance out your flaws with his strengths.

For a person who is totally obsessive and a bit of a control freak, a person such as oh I don't know MYSELF, it can be a confusing path to travel.

Mason, I've known you for a long time. One of my earliest memories of you is driving you to Jack's Quick Stop so you could buy me a pack of cigarettes. I was fifteen years old, and I had managed to talk my mom into letting me drive her car to your parents' apartment because they lived pretty close. I cruised through a stop sign on the way, and you said, "Buffy, be sure to always stop at that stop sign. Sometimes cops sit up there and pull people over for running it, and I don't want you to get into trouble." Because that's what you do- you take care of people. You think about other people and what you can do to help them. I'm lucky to know you, and I hope that we'll always be friends. I'm happy for you that you've found someone who makes you so happy and so secure and so unafraid to live your life the way that YOU want to.

Joy, I don't know you very well yet, but I hope that I'm going to get the opportunity to know you better. Mason has been happier and more carefree since he's been with you than I've heard him in a long time. If he loves you this much and is so sure of you, then I know you must be awesome.

I love you guys. Call me if y'all ever need someone to scrub your countertops with bleach.

Buffy