I met my person very early in life and it is the single greatest event that has shaped everything from that moment forward. This year I will have been married for 33 years to the love of my life that I met in high school. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but at the same time I remember distinct seasons of our relationship and love story, and how our relationship has changed over time. I’m sure there are other people who feel the same way about their person and love of their life, and I genuinely wish the same happiness and fulfillment for every marriage that I feel in mine.

Before I tell you the story from our meeting through today, first let me tell you about my person. Stephenie Marie Hooker is the love of my life. She is the smartest person I have ever met, she’s kind and loving with an armor of Titanium when necessary. She often puts others before herself and she works in an arena that tests her emotions and mental faculties daily, yet she remains committed to making a difference for others. She is the mother of two beautiful daughters, that we have raised to be outstanding young ladies. She’s imparted her wisdom and collective life experience to our daughters, who definitely know right from wrong and have a great sense of what to expect from others in the world. She is the one person I can confide in with complete confidence knowing that she will embrace my challenges as her own, and be there to help carry me forward when things are difficult. I cannot fathom a person loving another person more than I love my wife!

I met Stephenie in the junior year of high school. She was a member of the band that I noticed and immediately knew I wanted to get to know better. In high school, she was a very smart student and we had several mutual friends that allowed us to hang out together often. Throughout our junior and senior years, we had the opportunity to become better friends and it became boyfriend and girlfriend in my senior year. By the end of my senior year, I knew that I liked her and wanted to continue to date her, but I also knew that I had set my sights on joining the US Navy. Before I left for boot camp, I gave her a promise ring to hopefully set us on a path toward an even deeper and meaningful relationship while I was away at boot camp and she went off to college. After boot camp I came home to see her for just a month or so and then I had to return for nuclear power school in Orlando FL. We talked on the phone a lot and she and I were rapidly becoming best friends and making plans for our future. I remember one time being on the phone during a hurricane in Florida. The community phone booths were right outside the barracks building and the wind was howling, debris flying all around, and I was there on the phone talking to her! Also during that time, I went to the local mall jewelry store and purchased an engagement ring that I paid $100 a month for. During my first two years in the Navy, Stephenie was in charge of my finances and kept asking what the $100 was for, and I kept saying it was for pizza, my little code word for the engagement ring. She probably already knew what it was for and just played along wondering when I might propose.

When I finally finished nuclear power school I came back home on leave and that’s when I proposed. At this point in my life, I had still not purchased a car, didn’t even have a driver’s license yet, but I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this girl! During the short time between nuclear power school and nuclear prototype school I proposed, got my first driver’s license and purchased my first car. I wish I had a better story for my proposal.  I asked her to marry me in the parking lot of the Olive Garden where we had just had a nervous dinner. I’m certain she knew what I had planned and later on confessed that she was glad I waited until the parking lot instead of in the middle of the restaurant to propose. Even though we were now engaged, there was a long time before we actually got married. Stephenie’s Dad insisted that she finish college, and he would continue to pay for it, to make sure that was her priority before she came to live with me and get married. I completed another six months of training in Pocatello ID, attending the Navy nuclear prototype program there. Once prototype was completed, I had selected a fast attack submarine out of San Diego, California as my preferred first deployment with a ballistic missile submarine out of Bangor, Washington being a backup. Luckily, I got the backup, because that meant being at sea for three months and home for three months on a very predictable rotation. I moved to Washington state and did a few patrols on the USS Georgia blue crew, while living in an apartment with two other guys. Stephenie had to finish her last year of college and get her degree while I started my military career.  From promise ring to wedding was almost four whole years of waiting and becoming better and better friends, with much of that time separated. Long distance phone charges really racked up because we spent hours on the phone talking about everything possible.

When Stephenie finally did move to Washington, we got our first apartment together and for the first time we were a married couple living under the same roof. We never had an official honeymoon, where we got to go off to some exotic location together, so moving in together seemed like our honeymoon. You never really know a person until you live with them, and know all of the intricate details about their habits, schedule and the idiosyncrasies that make them either more annoying or more endeared to you. I don’t really recall any big differences when we started to live in the same house, except for Stephenie is a night person and I am more of a morning person. During our first years together, Stephenie was getting started in her career in mental health and child support services, and I continued the life of a sailor going to sea for three months at a time and coming home for about the same amount of time.

While I was in the Navy, my schedule and many life decisions revolved around my commitment to the military lifestyle and career. We made life decisions together as a couple, spending hours of time talking about the pros and cons of different decisions like reenlisting or exiting military service. Every decision was equally made taking our future plans, hopes and dreams into consideration and always centered around what was best for us as a couple. One of the best parts of being in the military was the other couples and people we made friends with, who were all living and experiencing the same challenges. The guys on the submarine had a special bond because we worked together for months on end, sharing lots of personal challenges and triumphs together. Likewise, our girlfriends, fiancées and wives, were also living similar experiences and relied on each other for strength and support in our absence. After spending six years associated with the USS Georgia blue crew, Stephenie and I had a great young adult friendship group, most of whom were also recently married. Many of those friends we still stay in touch with and could easily meet up with today and fall right back into deep friendship discussions, although they probably would be about our kids now instead of about ourselves. Connections and friendships made through military service seem to be the strongest types of friendships, and the ones that last the longest.

I had fully planned to retire from the Navy, however that was not in the cards. A few medical conditions made continued service less attractive than exiting the military and starting an entirely new career path. During my time in the Navy I spent an exceptional amount of time doing paperwork and research requiring me to learn at that time very new computer systems for the coalition of all that information. The Navy sent me to very old school computer training including MS-DOS windows operating system and WordPerfect which was the precursor to Microsoft Office programs. During that time a little company called Adobe began offering graphic design software which I picked up off of the pre Internet which was BS billboard systems that you had to use a manual connection via router to access from your computer. I had long been interested in and planned to learn as much as possible about personal computing. During my last shore rotation, I worked at a shop called 38C which was the outside machine shop and during that time I realized what it was that I wanted to do with the rest of my working career. I basically did a 180° turn and became a graphic design and website design creator, back when it was necessary to hand code most content.  I started using Adobe Photoshop on version 3 and each new program and bit of functionality that they added, I tried to incorporate into my new graphic design toolbox. I remember many times learning a new skill and being so proud to show Stephenie the new trick or technique I had learned, knowing that she might not fully understand how awesome it was. She always providing encouragement and a critical eye helping me to improve.

The decision to leave the Navy and begin an entirely new and different career was a significant challenge. Stephenie and I really had to work through the nervousness and difficulties of making that huge life change. It seems throughout the middle years of our marriage we had a back and forth of being strong and supportive as well as following personal dreams and aspirations. Soon after Stephenie moved up to the Pacific Northwest to be with me she decided to take on getting a master’s degree, which required a lot of extra time and effort on her part juggling school with full time work. About the time that she was done getting her master’s degree, I decided to leverage my GI bill as well as vocational rehabilitation programs offered by the VA. Stephenie supported me while I was doing school and working full time, and I continued that process getting my associates degree in web development followed by a Bachelor of Science degree in technical management. Eventually I decided to also get a master’s degree in project management, anticipating that it would pair well with my entrepreneurial goals. During this period of our life, we both relied on each other for stability and encouraged one another when things got difficult, always returning to our love and friendship as the core of our married life. We make a great team and were moving along quite nicely in our careers until we decided it was time to start our family.

Just before we started to think about kids, I remember a distinct conversation we had when we lived in our first house. We had just gotten our first puppy, his name was Jordan, and he was a little black lab and we were playing with him on the floor one night. I remember saying to Stephenie, “I can’t believe we are adulting now!” We seem to be living a perfect Disney style dream, where we had a car for each of us, a brand new home, we both felt very secure in our jobs and careers, yet at the same time we felt so young and like there should be some one watching over us still. I felt so proud of our lives together, the love, support and discipline that we had throughout our early marriage to get us to this point. So we decided it was time to start adding new little miniature humans to our love story.

Children are a huge complexity and new stress on even the strongest of relationships. My view of being a parent is that everything I do from the time they are born until they can be self-sufficient is in support of making them well adjusted individuals. With that said, keeping the bond and love between a husband and wife becomes a challenge because there’s a new focus that requires so much of your time, energy and thought. There were so many new things to learn and situations that required both of us to think differently about our relationship. I know for sure that Stephenie was the most prepared of the two of us to be a parent. She read all of the what to expect when expecting books and tried to teach me as much as possible, while also being the primary parent figure. I remember thinking so many times “why is the baby crying now?!” But as parents, we relied on each other providing support and love as much as possible, with a healthy dose of understanding when we just needed to be there for one another in difficult times. Overtime as our children grew, we started to do many things in support of their development like Girl Scouts & camps, playing soccer for the local recreational league as well as supporting them in their interests in school. We always came back together as a couple having special moments that included being proud parents together of our two daughters. In so many situations, we had to discuss how we were going to deal with specific behaviors and expectations from our girls, and we did this together so that we both knew we were on the same page and delivered a united front. One of the most cherished things that I don’t think we’ve ever articulated to one another is that we work well as a team. We both have equal input and come to decisions relatively quickly and easily, and for the most part it is a mutual decision that is the outcome. Of course there have been times where we had disagreements, but that never became a battle of wills with a sense of power projection between us. One of the most challenging aspects of having children is when they begin to have their own thoughts, make their own friends, and begin to make their own decisions. As our children are now both adults, even at this stage in their development we are still talking about what’s best for them so that we can provide the same advice and gentle pushing toward what we feel is in their best interest.