On Long-Lasting Marriage

It was Valentine's Day a couple of days ago, and on my Facebook status, I posted this:

Met my Valentine when I was a college freshman. Married him at 19, the summer after my sophomore year (he'd just graduated). Two adult children and two wee grandchildren later, we're still together. And I'm very happy about that. A life filled with shared memories, some joyous, some very difficult, but always together. You can't buy that anywhere.

One of the first responses I received was from someone a generation younger than me, who I had known a very long time. She believed that our (my husband's and my) marriage was a "Notebook"-style love that she has only seen in my generation, not her own. (Side note: "Notebook" is a somewhat cheesy, sentimental film based on an equally cheesy, sentimental book by Nicholas Sparks, but certainly the theme of love that does not wane from youth into old age and I-can't-live-without-you-if-you-die-I'll-have-to-die-too is there.)

I thought about her response for several hours, then wrote this back to her:

I hate to disillusion you, but I think there's no such thing as "Notebook"-worthy love except in the movies. Love is hard, and it takes commitment, and it's not always romantic, and it has its periods of dark anger and wishing life were different, sometimes bordering on a willingness to betray and back away -- and then you pray, and you try to start over with each other, but meanwhile the shared history helps cement you as does the love you share for your children, as do financial realities, as do the vows you made before God. And you press forward, and you get it done, and you look back many years later and are grateful it turned out this way, that you did indeed hang in there.

Oh...and getting away together on a vacation, fabulous! A rejuvenation, a renewal, positive happy shared energy. See the world with your enduring friend. You'll never regret it. It will keep you perpetually falling in love all over again. Laugh until you snort, and be amazed together, stand in awe together. Greet new cultures and new people (and new food) with grateful open-heartedness. All of these things bind you into a long-lasting couple.

I don't know any profound secrets. All I know is that it's easier to walk holding hands than not.

Does anyone else have thoughts on how to make a marriage long lasting, or on how not to kill each other before you get the opportunity to reflect back?

On Marrying Young

I was exclusively dating the only man I would marry at 18, and I married him at 19. I gave birth to my first baby at 21. Am I glad my own children didn't choose a similar path? Yes. Am I sorry that I did? Yes and no.

We met in college. He was two years ahead of me and had graduated by the time we married; we thought this mattered. I'd just completed my undergraduate sophomore year. My parents were against it, but they didn't have much of a leg to stand on. My mother also married at age 19, after her sophomore year. The difference was she dropped out of college, and I didn't.

I lost much of my youth by making this decision. And that included doing fun things, going on fun outings, hanging out with fun people, holding fun memories of my 20s. Instead, I was trying to be a full-time student and still be the kind of wife my parents would be proud of. I made my husband breakfast every morning before he went to work and before I headed out on my long commute to the college town (I always meticulously set the table for breakfast the night before, after I had cleaned up the dinner dishes). I was driven to do wifey well.

I am happy, at this age, to have wound up with the husband I did. But what was the hurry?

For my16th birthday, just two years before I met my future husband, I had asked for money to redecorate my bedroom, which my parents accommodated. That was when I learned I had an artistic flair for decor and interior design. I was still 17 when I started college, and my mother decided she and my father needed extra money for my younger brother's orthodontia. So when I went away to college, she rented out my room to a local schoolteacher. The teacher, whose academic vacations mirrored mine, would not physically be in my room when I came home for the holidays. But all of her stuff was (mine was packed away in boxes, except for the items I carried back and forth in my suitcase).

The room I had labored over had become the most charming bedroom in the house, and someone else -- for money that did not come to me -- received the gift of using it. To my young mind, and because that room meant so much to me, I felt displaced. I felt like I had been traded in. I felt homeless.

It sounds pretty whiny when I read back over this. Many young people have gone through much, much worse (I've gone through much worse). Still, at that time it was a life-changing set of circumstances for me. I decided to get married so I could have, and keep, the rooms I wanted. But of course that hasn't been perfectly executed either. Nothing ever is. And that's where growing up comes in.