Simple, But Not Easy. The 100% Marriage: Sunday musings…9/6/2026
It all started right around this time of year, 44years ago. Well, to be completely accurate it sorta, kinda, started in the bleachers of a UVM men’s basketball game almost a year earlier, but that was more of a “failure to launch” story that’s not all that interesting given the intervening decades. 44 years ago we went to watch a college football game together and I made dinner when we got home. Terribly over-baked scallops and cheap white wine if memory serves. Tomorrow Beth and I will celebrate 44 years together and 41 years of marriage. 10 addresses, occasionally 2 at a time. 5 dogs and 2 cats. 3 children. 7 grands. 4 mini-vans and 32 trips to Cape Cod with the in-laws. Countless meals that were better prepared and paired with better wine.
How does one do that?
Well, it’s simple but not easy. Nothing worthwhile ever really is. Simple that is. It starts with a 100% commitment. Not 50% + 50% mind you. Marriage isn’t committing to doing your share or splitting stuff down the middle. The 100% part of the 100% marriage is both people pledging 100% of everything they’ve got to making it work. All in from day one and every day from there on. Whenever anyone getting married asks Beth for her advice this is what she always tells them. You gotta be in for 100% from day one.
We met as students in the field of healthcare, and we acquired some really sage mentors very early on. The landscape in healthcare is littered with the carcasses of marriages that didn’t survive. Time after time our mentors pointed out the similar threads that ran through the stories of those marriages that fell apart. It almost always came down to something that came before the marriage in life’s pecking order. Maybe it was one career or another. Doctors are notorious for letting their careers get in front of everything. More generally our more seasoned friends pointed out the all-too-common timing of one rather typical failure, the arrival of the empty nest when the chicks had been at the center of a family’s life. Years and years of prioritizing Mom and Dad until one day you realize you barely know the person sipping coffee across the kitchen table.
Another 100% message: even with the arrival of children and all of the new and overwhelming responsibilities that come with them, the marriages that cruise through the rough seas that come up as a family grows are the ones where Mom and Dad remain first and foremost committed to being Mrs. and Mr.
Different folks who have a happy and loving marriage find different paths to accomplishing this. Beth and I chose to continue dating! For many years I told all kinds of people that the Honeymoon doesn’t have to be over until you say it is. But even without the event-level energy of a honeymoon, our simple strategy was to just continue our courtship. This isn’t always easy, just like I said a bit ago when I said we hit on “simple, not always easy.” But inside our house in front of our kids, and outside our house, with or without an audience, we found a way to make it clear that the one brightly shining beacon was going to be the Mr. and Mrs. of our family.
And thus was born Date Night.
You know, a little bit of luck can go a long way if it’s good luck that shows up at the right time. Our earliest dates began after the end of residency (even ophthalmology residencies don’t leave enough time for a baby AND a date). While hardly Dickensonian in scope, our lack of financial wherewithal was so scant that we had to choose between paying a babysitter or paying for dinner. Our first dates ranged from a shared cup of coffee all alone in a Burger King, to a single cappuccino, a magazine, and a bench in the back of a Borders. It didn’t matter; we were out on the town as Mr. and Mrs. and not Mom and Dad.
That bit of good luck arrived when we moved into house #2, very pregnant with child #3, when a phone number was given to us by one of our new neighbors. That phone number was attached to two sisters who lived around the corner and became our go-to baby sitters for 15 years or so. Date night became a thing when Kerry and Chrissy came into our lives and gave us the confidence to be out on a date every Tuesday or Wednesday night for years. In a wonderful turn of events Beth was able to pay back one of them when she babysat for Chrissy’s firstborn when it was time for the young Mom to head back to work.
It doesn’t matter what you do if you have a date night. Beth and I grew to love the pursuit of fine dining and everything that goes along with that. Other people who liked our idea did things like go to the movies, visit museums or galleries, or pursued a common hobby or sport. The details don’t matter. What matters is that you are openly saying that being wife and husband is important. Important enough that date night will be a huge priority. Date night will be defended.
Everybody who mattered knew about date night and how important it was to us. For sure the kids did. When they were very young they would get excited to see what we were wearing and hear where we were going. One of our earliest endeavors was a comically unsuccessful foray into ballroom dancing. This 3 month odyssey coincided with a period during which we couldn’t decide how we wanted to decorate our living room, and really couldn’t afford to do so even if we were divinely inspired. The kids renamed it the “dancing room” and we all practiced the samba together.
Simple, right? But still, not necessarily easy. Illnesses, injuries, occasional “really can’t say no” work stuff and other unremarkable and mundane life things sometimes got in the way. But you know, looking back, we had a run of 12 or so years when we really did manage to make a date night happen almost every week. An ending of sorts happened when we discovered that our routine had become a little bit too routinely predictable, leading to a rather common teenage behavior that quite comically caught both Beth and me by surprise. While hardly angels growing up neither Beth nor I would have ever dreamed of “borrowing” a family car without permission, especially before we had our driver’s license.
You can imagine our surprise when we came home 15 minutes earlier than usual to find that one of those mini-vans was AWOL and just in time to see it come careening into the driveway on two wheels, our child and a buddy in the front seats and the “escape vehicle” there to pick up said buddy close behind. Not easy. While this effectively put the formal Date Night on pause for a couple of years the very public consequence for our child and the private consequences of the three “accomplices” made it quite clear that the underage joy-riding was bad, but the much greater sin was the violation of Date Night!
So here we find ourselves. 41 years less a day since we married, almost 44 years since our first date. It’s a nothingburger number, 41, but it’s still another year of 100% from both of us, and the incalculable blessings that have come our way because of it. We’ll go out for dinner (we invited a bit of family to celebrate with us), and probably have a little bit of wine while we’re at it. We’ll hold hands. Maybe split a cappuccino. Simple stuff. And we’ll sneak a knowing a glance at one another and smile when everyone exclaims how easy we made it look.
Happy Anniversary, Dollie! I love you to the moon and back and I always will.
I”ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2026 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.