Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

What is the meaning of a marriage? More so, what does it mean to enjoy a long, happy marriage? Today is the 40th Anniversary of the happiest day of my life, the day I married the love of my life, Beth. 40 years! Big number, that. We’ve been together for 43 years in all. I’ve written and talked about our marriage and our decades-long love affair many times before. Today is a day to visit once again how wonderful it’s all been.

Much ink and many electrons have been spilled lately on the topic of marriage. The demographics of marriage are said to have shifted. Young people have been putting off marriage until they have reached certain very specific milestones in their lives. Education, job, savings, a self-defined state of security, and only then, marriage. This pattern has been dubbed the “capstone” marriage: once the structure of a life is built the celebratory “edifice” is added. As an aside since this leads to first marriages that occur after age 30, this pattern has been blamed, at least in part, for the decline in the national birth rate in the U.S., especially among the college educated.

For the most part our generation seemed to look at marriage more like our parents and grandparents had. Beth and I met at ages 21 and 22, dated, lived together for a bit, and then married at 24 and 25. In our extended circles of friends and acquaintances we were kind of in the middle of the Bell Curve age-wise. Judging by the number of weddings we attended together, admittedly a very suspect data source, it sure seems in retrospect that a majority of the weddings in an around our groups and our families took place around 24 or 25, give or take a couple of years. Likewise, when it came to starting our families, it sure seems like we all got to it within a year or two after getting married.

Pundits of today describe marriages like ours as “cornerstone” marriages. It’s not just that they are similar to patterns described in prior generations when it comes to things like age at marriage and first offspring, it’s that they are the primary building block of our lives as we became adults. Marriage and all that comes with it was, and is, both the foundation of adulthood and the gravitational center around which we lived our lives. For Beth and for me, and for our siblings and so many of our friends, this is pretty much nail on the head.

Our marriage began as our cornerstone, and for 40 years has been the touchstone of our life.

So what’s the secret? How do you stay happy, stay excited, stay married for so long? We both get asked this all the time. Have been asked since very early in our marriage, actually. When asked we both start with the leg up that we had from having parents and grandparents who had very long one-marriage lives. Having role models, especially ones you loved and looked up to was a huge head start.

From the gift of a good start what came next was the commitment to build around our marriage by putting it first whenever we had decisions to make. Beth likes to say that the adage that everything has to be 50/50 in a marriage is wrong by 50%; putting your marriage first means that you both need to be 100% committed to both the marriage and to each other. It’s 100/100! 50/50 might be a very workable strategy when you are divvying up the household chores, but it’s only a halfway commitment.

As much influence as our parents, grandparents, and their married friends had on our outlook on marriage we were also very aware of the classic life stressors that seemed to lead to divorce, especially in medical families. So many marriages that seemed so successful during the child-raising years seemed to fall apart just after the nest emptied. In my mind’s eye I imagined an empty-nester couple sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. They turn down a corner of their newspaper and realize that they don’t really know the person sitting across from them as anyone other than their parenting partner. Without conscious effort it seems all too easy to expend most or all of your time and energy supporting and raising a family, with little left over to support the marriage.

How can a couple avoid having to start all over again? The cornerstone only supports the house you’ve built if you continue to revisit it, touch it, and remember what it means. For us we declared that our courtship had never ended and so we never stopped dating.

Those dates were comical in the earliest days of our lives as parents. In those days of no time and less than no money a date might mean playing board games, holding hands while we watched “Hill Street Blues” or laughing together at silly stuff like “Alf”. We declared that Wednesdays would be “date night”. Out together as boyfriend and girlfriend, perhaps with another couple of two, never with a child in tow. Our first dates were pretty spartan affairs. With enough money for either a babysitter or an activity we opted to spring for the sitter and get out of the house. I remember holding hands at Burger King while we shared a cup of coffee. A “fancy” date might be sharing a cappuccino and reading magazines at Barnes and Noble.

Date night took wing when we moved into our first real house in Ohio and a neighbor gave us the phone number for the sisters who would be our babysitters for more than 10 years. Kerry and Chrissy became big sisters to our kids and little sisters to us, so much a part of the family that our kids were invited to both of their weddings. Beth and I signed up for ballroom dancing lessons. The perfect date night activity: hug your soulmate for 90 minutes every Wednesday so that you can practice dancing in your furniture-free living room every night after the kids go to bed!

And we still go out on dates every single week.

Was it easy getting here to year 40? Meh, nothing in life is easy, right? It never felt hard, though, and looking back it sure seemed like almost all of it was fun. I mean, every week I went out on a date with my girlfriend! No matter what was going on at home or at work we went left Mom and Dad at home and went out as Mr. and Mrs. And now here we are, married for 40 years, 43 years together. Put marriage first, 100% commitment, and never stop dating. As I drink my morning coffees and I turn down the corner of my newspapers I look at the woman who gave me the first happiest day of my life on Saturday, September 7, 1985.

And every day since.

Happy Anniversary, Dollie. I love you to the moon and back.

I’ll see you, 7 more happiest days of my life later, next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2025 at 3:04 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.