Reflections on 40 Years of Marriage

I hated to let our fortieth anniversary pass without writing about it -- but I've had writer's block. Finally, I read through years of old journal entries, and I realized why.

The reason that I find it hard to write about forty years of marriage is that I don't have a lot to say. Our story is amazingly simple. We fell in love, we stayed in love. In short, we were lucky.

I have no secrets about how to have a happy marriage. If you asked the experts, we probably did everything wrong. Sometimes we yelled, got mad about stupid little things, took out our frustrations on each other.

We never stayed mad for an entire 24 hours, but that was not by design. It was just that neither of us could stand it when the other was angry. If we left the house angry in the morning, we would each go into our office, close the door, call the other and make up.

In fact, most of our fights centered around one of us acting angry or inattentive, taking the other for granted, or, God forbid, seeming not to need or want the other around. Maybe we were always a little immature, but we somehow believed that if we fought about it enough, we could make our love perfect. I could never accept being together just because we fell in love once a long time ago. I wanted us to fall in love again, and again, and again...and we did.

For no particular reason, John always made me happy. Don't get me wrong, John is a wonderful person, and many people have told me so. But there are a lot of other wonderful people in the world. There is no explanation for why John's particular voice, particular smile, particular touch, make me so happy. I have stopped looking for the reason.

Now that we're older, we actually get along better. We have enough money, no young children to raise, and we've finally each learned to trust our judgment that marrying each other was a good idea. We've gotten past the idea that just because we married young, it would never work out. That was our parents' idea -- I sometimes feel that they went to their graves still waiting for our marriage to fail.

We haven't actually ever accepted the fact that we aren't still young, and, as long as we are together, we never need to. We adore being grandparents, but have simply adjusted our perspective, believing that we are young, our children are barely grown, and our grandchildren are babies.

We fell in love in what was then a faraway place, Rouen, France, when we were studying abroad. We never had a chance to show anyone in the family where our budding romance occurred... until this year. We had hoped to return with our whole family, but our daughter Rachel, her husband Jon, and their twenty month old twins had just relocated to Arkansas and were happily settling in. Our son Marc, his wife Cheryl and their two children, Hannah (7) and Max (3), were, however, able to accompany us to Paris, with a day planned for a trip to Rouen.

When we got to Rouen, it was gray and rainy. The streets looked smaller than I remembered, the pedestrian mall was deserted. I was telling myself to accept the fact we could never really share the magic, when, walking down the street holding Hannah's hand, she asked me how Grandpa and I knew were were in love.

It was, in fact, the street John and I were walking on, discussing an F.Scott Fitzgerald book, when he first proposed. At the time, I was so excited, I considered myself a veritable Zelda while she was still full of life and excitement.

When precious little Hannah asked me that question, I knew at once that she was the right person for the job of eldest grandchild. She was naturally intuitive, and would be a wonderful keeper of the flame. Suddenly the rain was beautiful, perfect really, and I felt as happy as I had on the day John had proposed. Maybe happier. The dreams we had dreamed so long ago and so far away had come true. In fact, life had exceeded our dreams, for we had made our way back to this place not only with a child, as we had dreamed, but with grandchildren too.

It took me a moment to answer Hannah's question. Then, I knew the answer was clear. "I just wanted to be with him all the time, " I said. And you know what? I still do.