The Grand Adventure

This month we are celebrating our forty-fifth anniversary of the day we began our officially licensed Grand Adventure. I’d like to think I’ve learned in all this time what makes marriage work – at least ours.

Selection is the key factor that outweighs all others to improve the odds of having a thriving marriage. You are not only in love with, in lust with, and want to ride into the sunset with your spouse – you must like them. A lot! Duh, you say, of course you like them, you’re getting married. Once the blush is off the bride and real life sets in, the liking will make them be interesting and pique your curiosity, to help maintain your affection for the next fifty, sixty, seventy years.

Grow up together. As college students, psuedo-adults, we weren’t completely formed when we married. We had lots of opportunities to grow up together – bending in the same direction – towards the light showing us the way.

It takes two to tangle. The first time that I threw a hissy fit worthy of my mother, my newly minted husband looked at me and began laughing. The harder I pitched that fit, the more he laughed. At first, it made me angrier. Then I realized how totally silly I must look. The crisis du jour passed. I’m not claiming we never fight, but I don’t throw fits. No point.

Other people’s marital advice is irrelevant. No one except the two people in a marriage truly understand what makes it click. What works for us may not work for you. I sometimes look at a couple and wonder what they see in one another. It’s really none of my business. The important thing is they see something that works for them. Except for a very brief period of time, we have been just us against the world – no family nearby. We had to talk to each other to solve our problems. There was no where to run. No one else’s shoulders to cry on. So we tried harder to find solutions from our wedded hearts.

Dont save your good manners for company. Isn’t it funny that the person who means the most to us is the one we sometimes treat the worst. When we were on the second week of a three week trip in Europe – an “if it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium” motor coach tour – we had two women who had been college roommates sitting near us. One day they announced, ” We’ve decided you’re on your honeymoon.” We started laughing and asked why they thought that. They said because we were so nice and polite to one another and held hands a lot. When we told them we’d celebrated our twenty-third wedding anniversary the week before – they were floored. We still use the magic words of Please and Thank You to one another and hold hands often.

Make time for one another. When you’re working a stressful job or getting tenure or just doing all the things daily life requires – it seems easy to give up time together, to postpone it or not do it purposefully – in order to squeeze everything else in. I’ve learned that staying in tune with each other is every bit as important – no – it’s more important – than anything else. Without one another – what have you got?

Decide who is to navigate and who is to steer. Jim has a great sense of direction and is a map reader without parallel. Put a sack on his head and dump him out somewhere and he’d find his way home (No, I have never done that!) My sense of direction is lousy, but I can usually steer around obstacles and have endurance for the drive. We won back-to-back road rallies (think scavenger hunt from your car) with me driving and Jim reading the clues and navigating. A yoked team can only go in one direction at a time and both sides must pull equally. It may change directions – even multiple times – but it can never go in two directions at the same time.

So far, it has been a glorious adventure! We have been truly blessed. I can’t wait to see what happens next!