Insider Information

Some of my married friends have anniversaries coming up and I asked if they’d like to write a guest entry for the blog as a way to both mark the occasion and pass on some insight to one who has yet to walk in married shoes. The first one arrived today and after reading it, I was so glad I asked. Here is a thoughtful exploration of marriage by my dear friend Jemi Reis McDonald. Enjoy. ~Deb

Just Let the Waters Wash You Clean

I have no advice about marriage, even though my husband and I are celebrating our 23^rd wedding anniversary on April 4^th. The longer it goes, the less I know for sure.

Every single day I feel we’re only as good as the moment right before we walk to our separate work spaces in our home; or only as good as how well we collaborate when the unexpected rings into our lives and we wing it, with or without each others’ sympathy. Here’s why: several times in my life I have had the experience of hearing from one long-married spouse or another, “We are SO MARRIED, we’ll still be together when they wheel us to the dining hall for cookies and bingo thirty years from now!” Darkly, and without a single exception, every one of those marriages has come apart. This has made me very humble in the face of perceived domestic security. Thus I always pause before giving marital advice, long and hard, if only to ask myself anew, anew, ‘What do I really even know about it?’  No advice then, but perhaps just a few observations and even they are spoken at a good clip, knocking on wood – and in stride. Here’s one: every day is a bonus point in a good marriage, whether it was a great day or a stomach-churner and if you’re smart, no one is keeping score.

In marriage, time itself will encourage you and also it will test you. Anniversary after anniversary. Though like any other test, it’s best not to cram the night before. Best to learn as you go and especially good to learn how to let go. Perhaps the greatest daily gift one can give a partner is to  be generous with your heart and not to judge; not to need them to act within expected emotional boundaries; not to draw any lines in the sand (especially that) and not to need to understand them as they change (and especially this). Because the true test of the years themselves seems to be not what you are at any given point – happy, rock-solid, Very Married, working-some-things-out – but rather how light on your feet you are in the face of change and if you’re still close enough to feel each others’ body-warmth while it all happens. Not common change, either: deep change. Change from left field. Change from an unrecognizable sound crashing in the next room. Change spoken while talking in one’s sleep. Change of habit. Change of preference. Change not knowing to what, but just because one feels it coming. Because the span of years themselves seem, in retrospect, to be only a current of flux running through the cupped hands. The big bonus being that you’re kneeling at the same streambed together, both thirsty, both fascinated and for the briefest moment of all – still safe, still together.

Then maybe this can happen: a silent moment broken only by the sound of a sip of tea and the crunch of toast on any given morning in a span of decades that wrenches your heart with gratitude more deeply than 250 close friends toasting your 30^th wedding dinner in the theater that’s finally on it’s feet with a whole wall of awards and next season’s seed money in the bank. Just one brief stunner with a summer breeze barely moving across the hands of first one, and then the other of you – still together after all these years.

~Jemi Reis-McDonald

Advertisement