To my future husband

To my sweetheart, my love, my future husband:

I miss you. I haven’t met you yet (or at least I’m pretty sure I haven’t), but I miss you terribly today. I'm not sure how that's possible, but it feels real because I feel like part of me is missing. On this gloomy, cloudy day when I'm camped out on the couch watching March Madness, I find myself in a place of longing. I am feeling a desire to be with the one whom my soul loves. I love you and I don’t even know you. I love you because I know you will be the one to love me the way I’ve always wanted to be loved; you will appreciate and adore me, even my quirks and sometimes frustrating habits. I love you because I know that you love our Savior just as much as I do, and you put Him before everything else in your life, even me. I love you because you are my other half- I know that you will complement me and push me to be the woman I strive to be every day.

But you should know that I, much like you probably, have been hurt. My heart has been shattered like glass and has cut my soul to pieces. I have given all of myself- put everything I have into relationships- and have come out still feeling inadequate and unwanted, leaving me with nothing but a whole bunch of lessons learned. But these lessons are valuable because they’ve taught me to protect myself and they’ve shown me what I should look for, which I know is you. And I know I’ll know it when I see you.

I want to be with you. I want to feel your arms around me, to hear your voice, and to be engulfed in your love. I am ready to feel like I am good enough- that me, who I am, is enough. I’m ready to meet you because I know that you’ll give me all the things I need and even some that I didn’t know I needed. You’ll appreciate, adore, be proud of, and love me with all that you are. And I can guarantee that I’ll never give you anything less than all of me. When I love, I love hard, and although this has brought me pain in the past, I know I’ll never regret loving you with my whole self because you will protect and take care of my heart. It makes me excited and happy to think of our love. I don’t know when it will come, when I will see you for the first time, but I have enough experience meeting the wrong ones that I think my heart will know you when my eyes see you for the first time.

I have no doubt that God’s timing is the best and most perfect thing. I am not looking for you, not seeking you out, but I am eager to meet you, whenever that may be. I trust that when the time is right and when God has finished readying us for one another, we will meet. But until then, just know that I’m thinking about you. I think about you often, not in a desperate way, but in a way that makes me excited for the life that we will share together. And in the meantime, I will be working to make sure I am the best woman I can be for you. I can’t wait to know you and love you. And I'm secretly hoping that in the future I can look back to this moment of longing, and then look at you next to me on the couch yelling at the games on TV during March Madness, and smile.