Lucky Fourteen

Fourteen years ago we had no concept of what fourteen years would be.  Honestly, you can’t blame us, fourteen years before we got married we were ten and eleven years old.  All you old timers who are sitting on forty or fifty years of marriage will have to forgive us, because in our chronologically limited perspective, fourteen years is a long time, it’s still more than a third of our lives.  Which is interesting if you think about it this way: for the first ten years of life, your parents are the most important people in your life.  For the second ten years of your life, you are the most important person in your life (sorry tweens, teens and twentysomethings, you do tend to be rather self-absorbed), all of the sudden, when you get married, you have to learn how to make someone other than your mommy, your daddy or yourself, a priority in your life, and that can be hard.

So here we are at a tipping point.  We have been married as long as we were children, as long as we were adolescents, we’re going to start creeping up on that point where we have been a couple longer than not.  I guess we’ve learned some things, I know we still have a lot to learn, but it’s good to take inventory every once in a while, so here are some of the things we’ve learned in fourteen years of marriage:

Teamwork is hard, but really important: too many people approach marriage as a goal, like the wedding is a victory celebration for all their hard work on the dating scene, but it’s totally not the goal, it’s just the kickoff.  All we really had after our wedding were some gifts we didn’t know what to do with and some pictures of ourselves looking about as nice as it’s humanly possible for us to look.  In fairly short order though, before we even wrote the thank you notes, we had to learn how to sacrifice what we wanted as individuals for the good of our relationship.  It was worked out in fits and starts, it involved some tears and some hurt feelings, it often felt like a lot of work, sometimes it still does.  But we needed to do that work, not just for the sake of staying married, for the sake of staying sane.  We’re both pretty glad that we had four years to work it out between the two of us because…

We didn’t get to be blissfully alone for very long.  You know how the song goes: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes (insert name of spouse here) with a baby carriage.  Don’t get me wrong, kids are great, they teach us the real meaning of love in a way that we never could have imagined on our wedding day, when we were positively oozing with talk of love.  But kids also push us to the absolute limits of what we can handle as grown ups.  We really appreciate each other most keenly when we’re dealing with our two kids.  Parenthood is not something either one of us wants to go alone (props to all the single parents out there, but I bet you wish you had a little more help sometimes).  Kids happen, they are a force of nature, and probably the only thing more frustrating than raising a couple of people that are a lot like you, but not quite you, is not being able to have them in the first place.  Which brings us to the hard reality…

Things won’t always go swimmingly, and we needed to learn to handle the bumps in the road.  We were lucky, neither one of us really thought that life was full of hallmark card sentiments and sappy love-story moments.  But it still came as a bit of a shock to both of us that person we just promised to spend the rest of our life with isn’t always going to look, act and smell as wonderful as they did on our wedding day.  The bumps in the road have built trust in each other.  It’s not the naïve expectation that we are each other’s savior, rather it is the reality of finding another who will stick with us in the rough patches, even if they are the proximate cause, or at least a major contributor to said rough patches.  We have noticed that a lot of people spend years on the dating scene looking for someone who shared their interests, was compatible (whatever that means), and gave them that tingly feeling in their guts.  If that’s you, stop it now!  What you really need is someone who is going to “be there when you fall, and not hold you down when you fly.”  Some goofy kids actually wrote that into their wedding vows fourteen years ago, but had no idea what that sort of thing actually entailed or how often they would have to rinse/lather/repeat.  Which means…

Don’t give up.  Most people that have stayed married for a lot longer than fourteen years have told us, when we asked the right questions, that it’s mostly a matter of sheer stubbornness.  You have to be dedicated and single-minded and not consider failure an option, and you both have to be that way, it doesn’t work in halves.  Luckily for us, we’re both ridiculously stubborn, but it can still push us to the limit.  On good days, like an anniversary, we know it’s all worth it, like when those little people we’re raising come and give us a hug for no reason at all.  At some point it’s not flowers and chocolates that show how much we love each other, it’s the much more mundane realities, like a sandwich packed for you before you go off to work, or a new Batman t-shirt waiting for you when you come home some random Tuesday.  There are times when we can sit together doing nothing at all, and realize that you don’t remember what it was like before that day you got married, and you don’t really want to think about not being together, and that’s after only fourteen years.