The Big Five O

Well, we made it!! The big five-O — If you were at this space last year at this time, you know that I was bemoaning the fact that we’d been married for 49 years and that, according to the experts, wasn’t anything special…. it just counted as another year of being married. 

You all know that I try to provide factual information here — of course sometime i resort to “alternate facts,” but this is real data, provided by the Census Bureau. Fifty-five percent of currently married couples have been married for at least 15 years, and thirty-five percent have reached their 15th anniversary. But — only six percent have made it to their 50th wedding anniversary.

So that puts us in a pretty select group. Our lives have changed in so many ways over the past 50 years…. I’ve mentioned before, that we’re now the elders of the family. When we got married, there were no iPhones and personal computers didn’t exist and if they had, no one would have had any idea what to do with them. Nine-eleven was just the eleventh day of September, mass shootings hadn’t yet become popular. And of course, who would have imagined that we’d have to live through a pandemic to get to 50 years.

A couple of people have said to me, “gee, that’s a long time — how’d you do it?” I never thought about it being particularly difficult — we’ve been lucky, we’ve had many, many more good times than bad times. 

I gave the same advice to both Kelly and David when they got married. I told them that the development of a good marriage isn’t a natural process — it’s an achievement. So I guess being married for 50 years is an achievement.

I also told both kids that the key to a good marriage was to love each other for what they are, not what you want them to be. Don’t enter marriage thinking someone will change, or that you can change someone. Over the years, there are two or three things I’d like to change about Claire, and there is something more than 16,000 things she’d like to change about me. But I didn’t and she didn’t.
That enabled two un-perfect people to put together pretty close to a perfect marriage. 
I propose a toast to the best 50 years of my life!!
— 30 —