My husband and I are celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary today. When we first got married the local paper had a weekly relationships column that basically said that once you passed the 10 year stage you were over the hump and likely to survive the rest of your lives together. I think that was strongly influenced by the divorce rates of the day, which showed that more than half of all relationships ended within the first couple of years.
Now that we've passed that milestone by 3 whole years, I feel I'm in some position to debunk the theory. There doesn't seem to be anything easier or different about the last couple of years than any that went before it. Of course, those first few years pass in a whirl of excitement, but the rest just seem to pass like driving through rolling green hills on a long car trip.
We spent some time mentoring a young couple who were getting married a couple of years ago and I chose the aptly named book, Dumb Things We Do: How to Stop Driving Each Other Crazy as our text. This book covers the dumb things guys do and the dumb things girls do separately. Just to give you a taste, the dumb things girls do include trying to fix him, not liking yourself and not getting involved in what he's doing. The man-ones are things like not growing up, not courting your wife and living as if work is number 1 in your life.
The beautiful thing about marriage is that there are always new things to learn and old things to get rid off. There are bad habit that creep back into your life, that need to be caste off, and special things you enjoy doing together that you wish you'd found years ago. Marriage is the ultimate adventure in life, you just have to make sure you stop and get out and look at the quirky things by the side of the road, and not just drive right by them.
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