My wife and I recently threw out one of our wedding presents, a beautiful spice rack.
It turns out we didn’t need cumin and bay leaves to spice up our lives when we have each other.
We’re celebrating another anniversary this weekend. We’re past the number where people question each year if you’ll make it to the next one, but we’re not quite to the ones where people celebrate your longevity.
After completing our 10th year of marriage, we jokingly agreed to sign on for another 10-year tour. While those first 10 years were sealed with a passionate kiss in front of all our friends and relatives, this one was witnessed by a couple of dogs roaming around the room with little more than a chuckle from either of us.
The divorce rate in the United States dropped to a 40-year low in 2015, at 16.9 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2015, down from 17.6 in 2014 and a drop of 25 percent from 1980, according to a Bowling Green State University study. That’s an encouraging trend.
For my wife and me, we stayed married because we wanted to stay married. I still genuinely enjoy my wife’s company. She genuinely puts up with mine.
We still go out on dates when we can find someone to watch the kids, an increasingly difficult task as our oldest has a part-time job that pays considerably better than our regular price of a roof over her head.
Lately we’ve started sneaking out for walks nearly nightly. If there’s anything that says “middle-aged couple,” it’s going for walks together through your neighborhood.
Some might say we’re still together in spite of some tough breaks we had along the way, including each of us having stressful careers in fields well-known to break up families, the near-death of our youngest daughter at birth, and the stresses of raising a diabetic oldest daughter.
That’s on top of the normal stuff that breaks up far too many marriages nowadays, such as money struggles, political differences, and the boredom some get in settling into a routine.
I’d argue the contrary, though. We succeed through our challenges. We support each other through some pretty traumatic events. She is weak when I am strong. I am weak when she is strong. Sometimes we are weak together. Still, we’re always stronger together than we could be apart.
That doesn’t come from us. That comes from our faith. God made us that way, and we’re grateful for it. Still, we make the choice every day to stay together.
We enjoyed some time together without our children to celebrate our anniversary Saturday night. While planning the evening, we kept stumbling over what to do, given our constraints of time and money.
I wasn’t much help. Whenever my wife asked what I wanted to do, I’d say it didn’t matter, as long as I got to do it with her.
It’s how we spent the 4,018 days between our wedding and this anniversary, and it’s how I want to spend the next 4,018 days, and then some.
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