Danielle

I hid my wedding and pregnancy from my family, and it went well. 

So this is me: a 19-year-old secretly getting married and living a “hidden marriage” for several months, until it was impossible to hide my pregnancy.

I think in retrospect I would have wanted to do better, but what's done is done.

I decided to get married in secret because my parents would never approve of me doing it so young, and because for a long time I felt they didn't approve of my husband and would have preferred a “more normal” man. Not that he was particularly weird, but he is a socially awkward man and not a big fan of social conventions.

So that's what we did, we arranged everything in secret and it was still kind of expensive, even considering the wedding only had 6 guests and we had pizza hut lunch afterwards. It cost $500 total, but it was worth it.

The amazing thing is that no one in my family found out until a year later, because a neighbor who happened to be walking by on the day of the wedding decided to tell my grandmother.

While we figured out what to do, my husband and I continued to live at home, seeing each other daily at the university and occasionally on weekends.

Those were nice months, going out to restaurants, going for walks and many other things we did. I got pregnant 3 months into the marriage and hid it for 6 months.

That was until the day that, already with a somewhat obvious belly, my mom decided to ask and everything exploded for me.

At first they didn't accept it and wanted me to continue living with them until I finished college. Naturally, neither my husband nor I accepted that idea and we moved in together.

It took a long time before we were able to resolve all the conflicts that this generated with my family, but I must say that, at the moment, I am very happy.