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| Young love beats odds
despite challenges, pressure |
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Jacque Lenz | The Appalachian |
Senior journalism
major Rachel S. Banks has more on her mind than the average student.
And more on the ring finger of her left hand, too.
Twenty-two-year-old Banks, formally Crisp, married
her boyfriend of two-and-a-half years in July.
“We had been together for awhile,” said Banks. “We
just thought the timing was right. It’s only one semester
that I have left in school, so we decided that in the long run
it wouldn’t be too much of a hardship.”
“At first, my parents said, ‘But you haven’t finished
college yet.’ They started talking about it with friends
of theirs [who] were the same age and older [when they] married
… and finally said it was OK.”
Banks lives with her husband, Andrew, in Winston-Salem and commutes
to Appalachian every weekday for classes.
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“It’s an
hour and 35 minutes one way, so that’s [more than] three
hours in the car every day,” she said. “It can be rough,
but it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.
“I do a lot of my planning just sitting in the car driving
and thinking about what I need to do.”
Traveling has not interfered with her studying, but it does affect
the amount of time she spends with her paramedic husband, said
Banks.
“[Spending] time together may at times be affected, because
his job schedule is 24 hours on, 48 hours off – and then
he has another 24-hour shift,” she said.
“It took awhile for me to get used to him being gone. …
And when he comes back he’s catching up on sleep.
“During the weekdays, it’s not so bad, but on the weekends,
when I haven’t seen him and … I want to catch up on
spending time with him, … he may be at work for that whole
entire Saturday.”
Banks admitted the schedule is unusual, but is adjusting to life
as a student and a wife.
“We do make time to go to the movies and one of us, usually
every couple days, [prepares] a… special dinner. … We
make the time to spend with each other,” she said.
Living with her husband has been a new challenge as well, said
Banks.
“Right after we got married … there [were] a couple
of weeks where there was some tension about whose space is what.
And we had some differences in opinion on how to decorate and
how to arrange the furniture, so it took some effort to compromise,”
said Banks.
Even formerly simple tasks such as cooking now require some extra
effort, she said.
“[Marriage] definitely changes perspective – you’re
not just thinking about yourself anymore. When you start thinking
about cooking dinner, it’s not ‘Oh what do I want?’
It’s ‘What do we want?’ That can add some difficulties.
[For example,] I’m a vegetarian and he hates vegetables,
so it just gets interesting working things out and cooperating.
“We really haven’t found ourselves fighting. We’ve
discussed things intensely, but it never turned into a battle.
I guess we see that trivial things don’t need to be fought
over,” she said.
Currently, Banks is concentrating on finishing school and will
attempt to get a job after she graduates in December.
“Right now I’m talking to [The] Kernersville News. They
said if I want to be a reporter I can, if I’m wanting to
do advertising, I can,” she said.
She and her husband plan on buying a house within three years,
but children are not in the near future, said Banks.
“We say [we’ll wait to have children for] about six
or seven [years]. … We want to have a lot of time together
to travel and have the freedom to just get up and say ‘All
right, let’s do this’ on a whim without having to plan
so much,” she said.
Banks said planning the summer wedding while still in college
was not as hard as she thought it would be, partially because
she had a year and half to get organized.
“I found that my mom and I were able to work around weekends
and school breaks. … We did a lot of wedding-planning, dress-shopping,
getting ideas together,” said Banks.
“For students who are planning weddings now – planning
to perfection is an ideal goal, just grasp the fact that it’s
not going to happen.
“Something will go wrong. I’ve heard of brides getting
so hung up on having things so perfect that they were miserable
the whole time during their wedding. … There’s a point
when you have to … go with the flow and enjoy your surroundings,
and know that the people who are there love you and are there
to celebrate in this day with you.” |
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