Today Claire and I are celebrating 47 years of marriage. There’s a lot of things I could write about the past 47 years… I could write about how undeserving I am and how amazing she is and how the last 47 years has been an amazing journey with her. Those things are all true and I could write about, and sincerely mean, them.
But I thought today, I’d just talk about marriage — and ours, in particular. If I remember correctly, when you marry, it’s for better or worse. We’ve had untold “better” times. We have a lot of friends that have been married a long time and appear to love each other very much. But I honestly can’t think of anyone who has had more fun being married than me and Claire. Of course, anyone can endure the good or better times. In the last 47 years, I can’t think of anything that we’ve experienced that would fall into the “worse” category.
I think our relationship with each other is the most important — more important than our relationships with friends, parents, relatives, our iPhones, or even our children. Yea, even our kids… I think they understand that and I don’t think they’d have it any other way. I think we have a pretty good balance between our common interests/hobbies/activities and our “own stuff.” There are things that I like that Claire really isn’t interested in and of course she’s interested/involved in things I don’t care so much about. But we’re supportive of each other and taking time away to enjoy those activities by ourselves or with friends makes our time together more special.
“They” say that in a marriage, communication is everything. I don’t disagree, but communicating with each other isn’t as easy as it sounds… Obviously, we both have different communication styles. I think I usually express my thoughts in a fairly straight-forward manner. Claire tends to be more all over the place when she tells me something. I’m not complaining… we both respect each other’s communication style and, in fact, since we’ve been married, I tend to talk (and ramble) a bit more and I have to say that Claire is better about getting to the point most of the time.
There’s a book titled “ Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” or something like that. Actually, that’s true. That’s because we’re different. We express ourselves differently, we solve problems differently, we respond to stress differently. When we’re driving, I react to the idiots on the road very differently than Claire. She handles difficult situations with much more diplomacy than I do. But accepting each other’s differences is all part of marriage.
Nit-picking is so easy to do….and it doesn’t accomplish anything. There are lots of little things that Claire does that I could pick apart — there are thousands (possibly millions) of things that I do that she could harp on. But life’s too short to nit-pick. We’ve been together long enough to see friends and family divorces, deaths and tragedies and realize how fortunate we’ve been…. so I think we keep nit-picking to a minimum.
So overall, to say it’s been a pretty good 47 years would be a monumental understatement — It’s been a great 47 years. Someone recently said that it was great that I’d found “the one” for me. I’m glad I found “the one” too. But we’d probably all be better off if we just tried to be “the one.” Happy Anniversary to Claire — and me…..
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