Twenty

On September 18, 1999 Michele Jackson and I got married at Merchantville Presbyterian Church in New Jersey.  The world was a different place then, we got hitched just before the end of the millennium, and a lot of people were stressing about a thing that was just called Y2K.  It was based on the idea that all these new-fangled computers wouldn't know what to do with themselves when all of the sudden they faced a double zero in the year column.  People predicted that electrical grids would crash and we would be cast back into the age of analog because all of our technology would basically have a nervous breakdown because of the impending double zeros.
As it turns out, it didn't end up doing much harm, if any. I guess one of the things that life has taught me in the last two decades is that the things you worry about are rarely the things that are really dangerous or difficult.  When you get married, you pledge to live your life with another person, to share in whatever comes down the pike, "for better or worse, for richer or for poorer...".  That's a bold promise to make and is usually only possible for people who are in a delusional state called love.
Sure you probably have some idea that there might be struggles.  If you actually have a professional clergy-person (such as myself) performing the ceremony they will probably have insisted that you get counseling of some sort prior to the event.  The primary purpose of this counseling is to let the people, who are living within the pleasant delusion of love, know that this thing called marriage can be difficult.  While they may, especially if they are young, assent to the sensibility of what you say, they will not really believe it, because surely they are different than everyone else and their love is oh so much stronger.  They will hear your admonishments that they need to learn to forgive and be forgiven, they will listen to whatever conflict management pyscho-babble you throw out there, and they will still walk down the aisle blissfully ignorant of anything that is going to happen after the reception.
In my line of work, I not only perform weddings, but I am in a position to observe marriages at all phases of life.  I see young parents trying to keep their toddlers clothed and reasonably quiet during church, I see families with teenagers trying to deal with monosyllabic "conversations," I know people going through fertility problems, people who have lost children, I have seen people married for longer than I have been alive dealing with the illness and death of their spouse.  Every one of those challenges, and the deep and meaningful variations on those challenges is a struggle that you cannot possibly be ready to face.
And yet, you do.
In the process, you change what you call love.  Love is no longer a pleasant delusion, it is a rock solid reality.  Marriage, if you stick it out long enough, clearly becomes an act of faith.  This is why churches, synagogues, temples and holy orders have been involved in something that is really on the surface just a civil arrangement. Faithfulness or fidelity is the core of what holds people together.  It is the promise of love.  Infidelity is the only grounds for divorce that Jesus recognizes, but that in and of itself, is a bigger idea than we generally recognize.  When you say the word "infidelity" in the context of a marriage you immediately envision "cheating," but that's far from the only way one can be unfaithful to a marriage.
You become unfaithful when you lose your faith in what you are together.  Sometimes it's stress that does it, one of those myriad challenges that we face as we go through life.  Other times it is just the numbness that comes with time and familiarity, people find themselves taking the other for granted, feeling easily aggrieved and set upon by the demands of another actual person, and absent of the pleasant delusion it becomes untenable.  The way to stay faithful is to take a minute to recognize the uniqueness of the one you Love, and to appreciate the Love they have for you as well. Acknowledge that both of you deserve to Love and be Loved, and what you were really doing way back when was promising to make that happen.
It has been twenty years since Michele and I made that promise.  We're still working on it.  When she changed her last name to mine, she kept the middle name her parents gave her rather than just bumping her maiden name back a space.  After twenty years I can't think of a better word to have in the middle of everything.
I love you Michele Faith Gaskill.  Happy 20th.