A marriage story

By Alaide Vilchis Ibarra

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Yes, it was the kind of story that makes every girl in the room breathe a collective “Awwww.” Even Anna, now Mrs. Buckley, remembers every detail with excitement in her voice. Matt and Anna made the decision to get married after Anna graduated from nursing school and while Matt had one year left of engineering school. Matt graduated in December.

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It was the perfect time for us. It sounds silly, but I just think that we are really meant for each other.

—Anna Buckley, KU graduate

One and a half years ago, Matt Buckley took his girlfriend, Anna, to watch fireworks at the Missouri River, where they had had their first date on a summer night in 2001. The couple from Atchison, now both KU graduates, went to the same rock they sat on that first summer, and Buckley got down on one knee and proposed.

Although college for most might seem to be the antithesis of settling down, Matt and Anna’s decision is not uncommon. According to the University Relations Web site, more than 1,000 students at the University are married. For Matt and Anna, there was never any doubt about their future together.

“We had been together for five years. I knew that it wasn’t going to end,” Matt says.

Although the decision to get married didn’t pose a problem for the couple, they say the hardest part of their marriage is balancing their life as a couple with Matt’s college life. Because Anna works night shifts as a nurse and Matt is at school until about 7 p.m., they don’t have much time to spend together.

Ciloue Stewart, a marriage and family therapist in Kansas City, Kan., says that knowing how to prioritize time is a common issue for married couples who are in college. To have an easier time doing this, Stewart recommends tackling the problem together by talking to each other about how much time they need to set aside for the relationship. She says it is important to set aside alone time, as well as time to hang out with friends.

Anna says that it is also difficult to remember that even if Matt is at home, he sometimes still needs to focus on school.

“I knew that he was a student going into getting married,” Anna says. “What I have to do is be supportive and we have to be there for one another.”

In an environment where it seems that people breakup and find another person immediately, Matt and Anna have found a way to deal with the difficulties of their young marriage. Both talk about the marriage with a certain confidence and familiarity that makes it hard to believe that young marriages are always thought of as very unstable.

Even Anna thinks it’s “a little weird” that there were no doubts about getting married and that she found nothing surprising when they moved in together. “You would think there would be because we dated for a long time but we never lived together before,” Anna says.

Stewart says that even though the breakup rate is higher at the beginning of a relationship, many other aspects, such as how individual couples handle problems, play a bigger part.

When asked whether she would recommend getting married while still in college, Anna says that although she doesn’t think that a couple has to wait until graduation for marriage, it isn’t for everyone. Couples should look at their relationship and decide whether it is the right time for them, Anna says.

As for her relationship, “It was the perfect time for us,” Anna says. “It sounds silly, but I just think that we are really meant for each other.”

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