"Staying married was the only way to work your problems out."--Miranda Lambert
I have been lucky enough to have stayed married to my best friend for over seventeen years.
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| Me an' the "Chief" back in the beginning |
No. That isn't right.
Luck may have caused us to find each other, but hard work, perseverance combined with lots of respect and love are the reasons we have stayed together so long.
We have survived things that most marriages in the United States have not. Financial troubles, difficult employment situations and the death of a child to name a few. Yet here we are, going strong and not even hinting at slowing down.
There are a lot of reasons we could quit and go our separate ways.
There is never enough money.
There are significant limits on the time we can spend together.
Medical issues.
Out interests are night and day sometimes.
I am on the road more often than I like.
She likes to be around people, I like to be alone.
She likes the beach, I like the mountains.
There are a lot of better reasons we stay.
Two teenagers.
A sixth grader.
A fourth grader.
A second grader.
A first grader.
A house on an island with coconut trees.
A past we have shared together, and a future we are building the same way.
Neither of us have ever been unfaithful. There is simply nobody else that is important.
In spite of my travels for work, the destinations I find myself in and the company I keep, I always find myself on the phone at least once a day to talk to my best friend and the love of my life. It is always her that I miss. I can't wait to go home to her, and to them.
We have little in common sometimes it seems, different music, different movies, sometimes different politics, but in the end what we have is more than enough to compensate for those differences. Like any man, I do stupid things, she puts up with them. We discuss things rather than avoid them, even though many times we avoid them for quite a while before we discuss them. We don't always agree, but more often than not we compromise in the end. She is her own person. I am mine. She is the brains, I am the brawn. She is the Yin, and I am the Yang.
It sounds corny, but she completes me.
It sounds crazy, how lucky did I get?
In this day and age of automated checkout lanes, IMAX theaters, international space stations and instant everything, it is often easiest to simply throw up your hands and walk away. No fuss, no hard feelings, its just business. Slow to hire and quick to fire. We are now raised to believe that if something doesn't work in our lives we should change it.
Think about your relationship as a classic 1963 split window Corvette. You are out driving it the way it was meant to be driven. It looks great to everyone, and it is running like a champ. Its a hell of a lot of fun, too. But then, you throw a rod right through the oil pan. Smoking and sputtering, you pull to the side of the road and call AAA...
You wouldn't dream of just scrapping this beautiful car, would you?
You would have to sink a lot of time and hard work into rebuilding the engine, but in the end it is totally worth the effort isn't it?
It may sound silly, but it's true. Relationships require work. You can't always just walk away from an issue or ignore it an hope it will go away. I should know. Ignoring things has always been my favorite method. I don't always work as hard as I could for my marriage, but there have been times that I have had to work harder than I ever thought possible. I look at my friends and even some of my family who have been married two or even three times, and wonder how they do it! How--or for that matter why they would want to subject themselves to that kind of misery over and over again is a mystery to me.
Perhaps its the Marine in me?
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| The "chief" and me fifteen years later! |
You also have to work on seeing the person you fell in love with in the first place. No matter how much time has gone by, I look into my wife's eyes and I still see the willowy 24 year old beauty that caught my attention all those years ago. No matter what she thinks of herself, I can't see anything but the most beautiful woman in the world. There may be an ocean of "tens" out there, but I have my "eleven" waiting for me at home.
I love my wife. But it takes work.
Not because she isn't worthy or anything of that sort, but because anything worth having is hard work.
And trust me, it has only gotten better. Every year. Every week. Every moment is better than the last.
Miranda Lambert is right, you know. "It's only worth the time you put in."
The longer it takes for couples to realize that it is more "blood, sweat and tears" sometimes than it is "happily ever after," the longer we will have to admit that...
We are still savages.
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