50 years...
The Secret to a long relationship!
What is the secret to being married 50 years?
“We haven’t killed each other!” or “We just kept breathing!” are two options that come to mind.
Paul and I are looking at our 50th wedding anniversary this month.
One of the most valuable pieces of advice I read all those years ago came from a Reader’s Digest joke. It said something like: When a husband comes home from work and the dog meets him with his tail wagging happily and his wife just grumbles with reminders of chores to do - which one do you think he’ll like best?
On the other hand, a suggestion I didn’t like was to “never go to bed angry.” Now that might be a good idea but I like comedienne Phyllis Diller’s advice better: “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”
I think more practical advice on the internet comes from Robert Anderson: “In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, the grounds for marriage.”
Also, marital and family therapy’s James L. Framo explains:
“People do not marry people, not real ones anyway; they marry what they think the person is... The exciting adventure of marriage is finding out who the partner really is.”
And my Paul explains: “We don’t marry people just like ourselves. But we try to help the other person grow rather than put them down. Together we can do a lot better than as individuals. This is based on our faith and the wisdom from the Bible.”
That is kind of what we found when we had our old 16mm wedding movies copied onto a DVD. I edited them and added sound. (They are available by going to www.paulrosie.com or the Beacon's Community Page on www.cannonfalls.com.)
In these old movies I saw our guests smiling and I burst into tears because so many of them are no longer with us. And I miss them so.
For example, the old movie captured the only color picture I have of my sister at the wedding as she kissed me good-by when Paul and I left on our honeymoon.
And neither of us could get over how young we looked and had no idea of the joys and the difficulties that were ahead of us.
I also chuckled when I saw that after the church reception, some of the neighbors and friends gathered in my folks’ small basement for another party. No fancy band. Just painted cement walls decorated with crepe paper.
You see, my parents had been immigrants. They had gone through one war in Europe and then were hit here with the “Great Depression”.
So the party might not have been as fancy as some others, but you could count on lots of food! And one man brought his zither and another his banjo. Others joined in the singing. Others danced.
And so it’s memories like this that explain the concept: “Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.” (Simone Signoret.)
It’s making your “history” together.
And when I recall all the mistakes I made, I like the sweet consolation that Maya Angelou gives: “You did the best that you knew how. Now that you know better, you'll do better.”
That's encouraging... for every part of life.
