My wife and I are spending my spring break week in Las Vegas, to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. This was her idea, really, but I’m glad she pushed it. I don’t know what every would have gotten me out here, and this is a place I should see. Since I’m a part-time pro magician, and since Vegas is the town where magicians come to “make it,” I should have had the Vegas experience long ago.

We’ve been overwhelmed in our first 18 hours here. Too much to see and experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, December 18, was my wife’s and my wedding anniversary. We got married on that date in 1976.

We didn’t do a whole lot of special stuff yesterday. We gave the money for the altar flowers in the church we attend; later in the day we went to her boss’s holiday party at his house, and afterwards went to the Shakespeare Theatre in DC, where we have season tickets. A kind of boring, middle-aged, middle-class day, I guess.

But I thought all day long about how and why we’re still married after 29 years. That really is a long time. We’ve been married to each other far more than half of our lives–that is, we’ve been together longer than we’ve not been together.

How do you stay together for 29 years? Well, I think, for one thing, I must have been very, very lucky at age 23 to have met the Love of My Life. I mean that: pure, dumb luck. I really think I was too young to have any reasonable idea of what we were doing. We just knew that getting married was a good thing to do.

Physical attraction is actually quite important, but it’s just the starting place. Being hot for each other when you’re young establishes the way you see each other for the rest of your lives. We are still very attracted to each other, but we both look like middle-aged people now.

It also helps to have parents who modelled being together. Both my wife’s parents (who are both now deceased) and my parents (who are both living and well) stayed with their one spouse all their adult lives. For the two of us, that was an important model to try to emulate.

It probably also helped to have kids. We had our first child after we’d been married eight years, so that means just after the fabled “seven-year itch,” when you look at each other and really wonder whether you made a real mistake a long time ago. Our second child, still living at home with us, provides us with another source of pride and frustration–a “project” in which we are both engaged every day.

But I think the most important thing is always to be willing to give up something. Each of us has given up a lot for the sake of staying together. We both set out to be actors, but we gave that up when we realized we would have to be separated a lot. We opted to stay together rather than to pursue careers that might have been much more professionally fulfilling than what we have done for a living instead. My wife agreed to go with me from one town to another to support my career; and when I was denied tenure and lost a job as an assistant professor, I decided to stay here in the DC area in our happy home, rather than try to find a university job somewhere else.

I think if one always insists on having what one really thinks one should have, one has no chance of staying with a life partner for the long term. But I also think that’s probably the worst thing one could do. At the end of your life, your fans or loyal readers or listeners or viewers won’t put up with your deafness or bad habits or forgetfulness. But a life partner will.

Categories: midlife, marriage