Why I Got Married For The First (And Only) Time At 48

If you haven’t seen me on my blog or on YouTube the past couple of months, there is a very good reason. I got married.

For the first time.

At 48.

I can’t say that those of you who know me really well would be all that surprised that I got married because I don’t know how many folks really know me all that well. The one person who gets me better than anybody? Well, I married her.

We met the old-fashioned way: the Internet.

We dated for three years.

We lived together for one.

She is beautiful, kind, compassionate, sweet, helpful, optimistic. She is an extraordinary mother, the kind of Mom that all the neighborhood kids flock to. All. She is professionally ambitious and successful. She is understanding, both of what shapes our pasts but also of how we both envision the future. She is tremendously resourceful; with her, I feel like we can accomplish anything we’d like.

She is unfailingly positive and inclusive, setting an example not only for her 10-year-old daughter, Olivia, but for me as well.

She has a wonderful extended family, all of whom I got to know early on. And she likes my people, too.

She got to know my mother before she passed, and Mary Welton wholeheartedly approved of her, not something she granted automatically to anybody. She was a rock for me through the process of Mom’s last days, her passing and all the work that went into her estate (and still is ongoing).

We have traveled together. A lot.

We both love beaches and California and the color teal.

We like the same kinds of foods and both have a very open palate. We both love to cook, but she has a talent for it, while I love to clean. Seriously. It’s kind of perfect.

We both love baseball, one of the first things I learned about her. She also enjoys other sports and rooted for the Cleveland Browns with me all of last fall. We adopted them as “our” team.

Our musical tastes are mostly aligned, too. Movies and TV, too.

We have a similar outlook and temperament. I understand her love languages and she gets mine. We get along amazingly well, and I was beyond excited to propose to her one day before her birthday, October 3, 2018, in hopes of marrying her on what would have been my mother’s 80th birthday on April 12, 2019.

And that’s exactly what we did.

Introducing Ryan and Kristi Welton. (Mr. and Mr., according to the forks we were holding. Works for us, ha!)

More blogs, pics and stories from the wedding and honeymoon coming up! It was important to me to focus the past 60-90 days on the big event, making sure that I focused my attention on the wedding, our trip to Canada and all the home-centric things we both have going on, including for me the eventual sale of two other homes — mine in Norman and Mom’s in Henryetta.

Cheers for now.