(This post is a "Happy Anniversary" nod to my sweet husband in celebration of our 40 years of marriage. Love you, Rice!)
One billion two-hundred sixty-one million four-hundred-forty thousand seconds. Do you know what that represents? If you replied, “Forty years,” you’re correct. Even if your math skills only allowed you to murmur, “A freaking long time,” you’d still be correct. Believe me, I know, because it also happens to be the amount of time that I’ve been married. To the same man. For forty years. Forty. The number itself gives me pause. For some reason, I never thought I’d even live that many years. Who knows why? I just remember being plenty pleased when I hit the old 4-0. Ah, sweet forty. You weave through our lives in ways that are sometimes profound. The Bible tells us that Jesus spent forty days fasting in the wilderness and the Jews wandered the desert for forty years. In Arabian Nights, Ali Baba took on forty thieves. Women endure forty weeks of pregnancy. Of course, forty can pass our way in less significant ways as well. Consider the forty-hour work week or the forty-space Monopoly board. And then consider this about forty-five:
Digressions aside, I never pictured myself surpassing the forty-year mark when it comes to any institution. Forty years breaks down to 146,000 days or 350,400 hours. It’s 21,024,000 minutes, or, for pity’s sake, over a third of a freakin’ century (0.3999, to be exact). That’s a looooong time, Toto. I never envisioned Rice and me reaching such a marital milestone.
It’s not that we take marriage lightly, although, admittedly, I’m more of a realist than a romantic. My own mom was married, and subsequently widowed, three times. Her longest marriage? Six years. The reality is, tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us.
“You don’t think there’s some kind of black widow’s curse that runs in the family?” Rice asked me that question shortly before we said our “I do’s.”
He meant it to shed some levity. I think. In retrospect, it may indeed be levity—an ability to laugh together over the most mundane moments—that has been a cornerstone to getting us to the forty-year mark. God only knows if there’s actually a key to making a marriage work. That doesn’t stop people from spouting opinions, though. If you’d like a few giggles, take the quiz below and ponder who has said what about love and marriage through the years.
So, what d'ya think? Did your thoughts run more parallel to Margaret Atwood’s than you might like to admit? Or maybe you concurred with Julia Child? Bless her heart, and bless yours, too.
Fun and luck aside, experts tell us there really may be ways to increase our chances to stay happily married. Cornell researchers insist it requires honest conversations about money. Mental wellness counselor David Ezell recommends that we keep on dating. Certified counselor Jonathan Bennett touts the benefits of training for endurance events, like marathons or bike races, with a loved one. (Yowza. I’m pretty sure Rice and I are sunk if getting through Year 41 requires completing a couples’ triathlon.)
Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, believes that the key to marital bliss may be to make your relationship as boring as possible. He reasons that it’s not years of traveling on private jets and snapping photos of exotic locales that bind our coupledom. Rather, it’s being able to be boring together. Boring, as in sitting around, watching TV, cooking dinner, doing nothing, living with no huge drama.
Does Manson need his head examined? I mean, c’mon, I love my memories of traveling with Rice through the years. I adore our photos of Sonoma and Europe, our walks through vineyards and ruins, our first tastes of a vibrant red blend or an exotic cuisine that’s new to us.
Then again, some of my most loved memories with Rice do tend to focus on, well, being boring together. Like the time we got in the car and followed a map to a little corner store in Michigan because we wanted to travel to a town called Bliss. (That was the actual town of Bliss, that little corner.) Or does it get much better than sitting around the family room, watching our grands dance...or hanging out with them in the kitchen while we nuke some mac ‘n cheese? And what about those ultra-mundane moments, like when one of us snores so loudly it wakes us both up, and we get the giggles so badly the bed shakes, and, just when we think our moment of immaturity has passed, another wave of twitters leaves us gasping for breath through our tears.
Now that I think of it, Mark Manson may not be crazy at that. Perhaps I’m ready to be institutionalized after all. When you ask me what one billion two-hundred sixty-one million four-hundred-forty thousand seconds of marriage feels like, maybe I’ll tell you, “A freaking long time.” But possibly, quite probably, I’ll add this:
“It feels like a pretty damned good start!”
Cheers! Jan
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