Anniversary Thoughts

At our wedding anniversary celebration, that marked a significant period, this past weekend our kids and their spouses took us to dinner. Each of our kids toasted us and said some very kind words about us. They both have grown up to become mature responsible adults with spouses who love each of them and we love them and our granddaughter very much and are proud of them all.

They asked me to offer a toast and to talk about my wife. I took a few minutes and thought and talked about a successful marriage is never final and it is not guaranteed. The success, if you want to call it that, should be looked at on a minute by minute basis I think. Things can and do happen quickly and if you can deal with the minutes then you can deal with the hours, days, weeks, etc.

To stay together for a long time is one thing but I think it is more important to want to be together. There were a few times when we struggled and we were on the verge of divorce. There were financial strains and health challenges and job situations.

I told them that I appreciate my wife because I know there were many times I thought she would leave because I was nowhere near a model husband or father. Marriage exposed my many weaknesses and immaturities that I had never thought I needed to change for marriage. My wife also had some issues to resolve. I had to make decisions to address and change some things. It wasn’t always easy or pretty but my wife stood beside me and encouraged me as long as I did what I said I would.

I think what helped a lot was that we were friends when we got married and continue to see each other as friends. We always enjoyed being together. We liked to talk about things and many weekends at breakfast we would read the Sunday newspaper together and discussed things that caught our attention. We learned more and more about each other – what we each liked and what we didn’t. We still continue these kinds of things and we still are friends.

We are different people but we are interested in each other. We each respect each other and realize that we will not always agree on everything. We have learned how to work things out quickly because we realize that not everything is a major issue. We try to think long term.

Is everything above the answer for you? I don’t think so. I don’t think a formula works for a happy and meaningful marriage.  We had to spend time to learn about each other, to figure out each other’s interests and how the other dealt with things. One of us was more emotional than the other and that impacted the other who was more logical. BTW I am the emotional one.

I do think there was one thing that made a difference. Early on in our marriage we heard someone say that you need to make a commitment to stay together and not get divorced. We took that to heart and made that commitment to each other. So when the difficult times came, and they will continue to occur because we are different people, the choice we made was that we need to work this out because neither of us is leaving rather than thinking should we work this out or should we leave. Not much commitment in that second option is there. You don’t have to say anything to your spouse your actions will show what your decision is.

If you make it easy for yourself to leave then you will.