I had lunch with some dear friends today. One was Debbie Gillenwater, currently co-director of the Union County Family Resource Center. Many Union Countians will remember Ms. Debbie as a wonderful first grade teacher at Maynardville Elementary School.
The other friend was Sara Collins, who works with Family and Community Engagement for the Union County Public Schools. I have known Sara since she was a pretty little girl attending Bible School at the First Baptist Church of Maynardville. Sara has over the years become a good friend of mine, and it is from Sara that inspiration for this article came.
Sara and her family recently went on vacation in Texas. She was telling Ms. Debbie and me about it during lunch. She showed us pictures and told us of a wonderful lobby that was outfitted with old relics and books. She showed us pictures of some of the sayings from the books.
This saying in particular caught my interest:
“I cannot sleep without you anymore,” you said, soft and lost in my tired arms.
“Nor I, without you,” I said, the weight of your head on my chest.
We are built to be one, one thing in the dark hours, one breath rising into the ether above us. Move closer, still closer, until no space exists between us, until this skin becomes that skin, and all I am is shared with all you are.
How romantic! How idealistic! Doesn’t this sound like two first loves, each the other’s soulmate, who can barely stand to be apart? Ah, the joys of young love. This is an idealistic vision of the beginning of a married couple’s life journey together.
How long does it last? I suppose it varies from couple to couple. I know of people who have been married for many years to which this would still apply.
Three months after I married my bride, I was sitting next to her, I on the arm of the couch, she on the couch. We were right next to each other, flesh touching flesh, my arm draped around her shoulders, and I said to her, “Did you ever think it would be this good?” Her reply—“I was hoping for the !@#$ of a lot better than this!” We both got a laugh from that.
Another time, after a spat, when we were each smoking on separate ends of the same couch, my life looked at me and said, “MINCEY! DO YOU LOVE ME?” I looked back and said, “Mary Ann, a man would have to!” We both ended up laughing.
Nothing like a sense of humor to spice up a marriage. (Who was it that said that there was truth in jest?)
Now let’s move to the middle of a marriage. Picture it—the husband goes to bed first, his C-PAP mask on his face, turns on the television, curls up in fetal position, gathers the covers comfortably around his body, and settles down for a nice long nap.
Here comes the wife, who first makes fun of how ridiculous hubby looks in his mask, demands to know why he cannot sleep without the television, why it has to be so loud, then gets into bed, jerking all the cover from her husband’s just-warmed body. She wants to know if he can get any farther away from her in the bed, so he slides his now cooling body against her freezing feet and hands, trying not to moan from the pain the movement causes his lower back. Soon she is snoring so loudly that he cannot hear the television, so he turns it up louder to drown out the snoring and the white noise from the C-PAP machine.
Move a few years farther down the marriage ramp. Hubby sleeps in one bed, wife in another, in different rooms.
Even further—different beds in different houses.
Still further? Different beds in different towns?
Why do some couples go from barely being able to be apart to being unable to stand being together? The sad truth is that some people are so misled by the ideals that society portrays about love and marriage that they fail to understand before entering into the holy state that successful marriages only come with lots of work and cooperation from both sides.
After a woman marries, her husband gets to be there every day to see the lack of makeup, the “dressed-down” look, the bad moods, the times the house is a mess, when the kids are terrors, when no one wants to share or compromise.
The wife gets to see the husband unshaved, unkempt, hogging the television, losing that romantic feeling, becoming absorbed in the job and not the family, being just a little too human.
Wonder what prose an ailing marriage would generate? Humorous, possibly, but definitely not idealistic.
How did they get here from the intimacy of the beginning? Is there any hope to keep the magic in marriage?
Sure there is. I can take you to some of the couples who have done so over the course of many years. I’m sure they would be willing to share some of the ways they have managed to keep their marriages young, possibly for a fee (hee, hee)!
I’ll share something that a friend once told me. She said she and her husband had a date night once each week. Sometimes it was to do nothing more than go grocery shopping together, without the kids. I replied that I didn’t think of that as a “date,” but more as a chore. Looking back, I suppose that is the beauty of true love—being able to find each other even in the mundane.
Most difficult.
Marriage is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I would not dare say I’ve been overly successful. You’d have to ask the wife about that. (And if you do, I’ll pay you five dollars to tell me what she says!)
Happy days to all you married couples. May each day grow brighter and better for your union. And on the bad days, remember—humor helps!
Someone said,
“75 Years Ago:
Every family had a father and a mother.
Until I was 25, I called every woman older than me, ‘mam’.
And after I turned 25, I still called policemen and every man with a title, ‘Sir’.
We believed that a lady needed a husband to have a baby.”
The luck of some people in marriage is like a bald guy who just won a comb.