44 Years…Wait…What? How Can That Be?
On June
17, 1972 I got married. I was 20 years old. The groom was 3 days past his 20th.
So from the beginning you could say we did everything wrong. I wonder what the
odds were then that we would stay married? Probably not too good. But here we
are 44 years later and to quote a song that has also been around for years, “You’re
still the one.”
That is
not to say I haven’t on any given day wanted to cheerfully annihilate “the one.” To any
long-married couple who can say, “We’ve never gone to bed angry,” I say, Good.
For. You. I have. And I’ve gotten up angry and stayed angry for most of a day
or until he called and asked, “What’s for dinner?” and then we started talking
about that or some other issue that had nothing to do with what made me angry
in the first place. Pretty soon you decide staying angry takes too much energy
and you let it go.
I once
listened to a talk about different psychological personalities and how they
match up. The speaker described these two: the one who gets mad, holds on to
their madness, and remembers forever what they were mad about and why, and the
one who gets mad, yells, acts pissed off, and then five minutes later is not
mad, and ten minutes later does not remember being mad. When I heard those
descriptions a light bulb flashed in my mind. That’s us! That is us to a t! I
will let you guess who is who in the equation, but who knew we could be so
perfectly profiled?
Sometimes
I wonder what it was that drew us together. We met senior year of high school
when our two schools (small Catholic rival schools) merged and became one. I
think our first encounter was when I gave him a ride home after some jerk from
another school had popped him in the face and his buddies dumped him. My
girlfriend and I put him in the back seat of my mom’s 1959 Oldsmobile
convertible and took him to his house where we promptly left him before his parents
could come out and ask questions. At
school the next week he sat behind me in some class, tapped me on the shoulder,
and asked if I had any aspirin. His lip was still swollen, and he was wearing
sunglasses to cover a black eye. I think I felt sorry for him. Is that when
love was born?
You can’t
go through 44 years without a lot of ups and downs, and we’ve had our share,
but somehow we’ve always managed to stick it out and get to the other side. We
have a lot of shared interests; we both listen to the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd,
and Johnny Cash. We favor trips to national parks and have never been on a
cruise. We don’t read the same books and we argue about gun control. We usually
vote the same (thank goodness!) and we sometimes watch the same TV shows and
movies. He got me hooked on Modern Family and Big Bang Theory. I’ve taken him
to the darker side with Law and Order SVU and CSI. He goes to bed
early. I stay up late.
To any
young couple just getting married, I would offer this advice. Make darn sure
you like the person you are marrying. Yes, I know you love them but do you like
them? Sometimes liking someone is enough to get you through the “I don’t know if
I love him anymore” days. Conversely, loving is the thing that makes you care
for someone when they’re ill and support them through job loss and loss of
loved ones. Love is what helps you rise above the many disappointments that are sure to come your way. Make sure you grow enough of both emotions because that is what
will carry you through 44 years.
Perhaps
this is why I choose to write romance, in the hope that I can give this to the
characters in my books, the hope that when I leave them at the end, they are
going on to 44 years and more together. (Because you know, in my mind, they do
go on, because they are real.) I never
promise them a happily-ever-after, because I don’t know if there is such a thing, but
I do believe in working hard at something every day and making it last.
