TMEW and I just celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary so I think that we might have a bit of experience of what makes a marriage work, mostly. And yes, mostly can be the operative word as sometimes marriages hit spots when they don’t work for one reason or another. Arguments, fiscal issues, relationship problems, work demands, and health situations (not to mention kids) are all the common ones – and sometimes, uncommon manifestations of each and if you have the same last name as I, Murphy’s Laws can often have them pop up several at a like the carny Whack-a-Mole game.
Yet, when we realized that we were "meant to be", what I heard at lunch time (as TMEW was parsing through "her" programs that had been DVR’d) on one of those "Entertainment Celebrity worship programs" just had my jaw dropping:
"You gotta live together and you have to sleep together [before the wedding]," Coco tells me, "If you don’t sleep together, what if you’re not compatible in bed or you don’t like what they do?"
Look, that’s not to say that sex is isn’t important or that physical attraction doesn’t play into the calculus, but if that is what you are going to base a marriage on, well, I posit it will be rather unlikely that you will see #30. I may be old fashioned (certainly I come at this from a conservative Evangelical perspective) but doing a "trial run" was never something we even contemplated.
While it may differ from couple to couple, here’s what I have trained myself to keep forefront:
- It’s not the physical portion of a marriage that is the most important (and if you think it is, you will either find out quickly it isn’t or you may not get the chance to find out at all, as you may not get the chance to master the second point.
- Elimination of the word "divorce" from my vocabulary (a decision that has a consequence)
- Love is not just an emotion – it is a verb. And a verb denotes action. And action derives from a decision. I can ALWAYS consciously decide to love TMEW regardless of the emotion(s) I am currently experiencing (i.e., *I* can control my emotion, although it can be hard to do sometimes and sometimes I do fail to do the right thing).
- Plain and simple – I made a vow, a sacred promise. Not only to TMEW but before God as well. A most serious situation.
Oh yeah, that part in the vow that states "in sickness and in health"? Little did I know at that first day, how many often during the past three decades that the little guy that sits on my shoulder would whisper in my virtual ear reminding me of that phrase which translated ever so often that "marriage is not about my needs, it is about TMEW’s". Sure sounds easy, but trust me, sometimes that little guy has had to use one of these to get, keep, and remind me where my attention should be.
No, sometimes I don’t WANT to stick to any of those items – hey, I’m human. And those items may not work for everyone. But this bit of advice might be handy to keep around:
Marriage is not about the lust in the beginning nor the love in the middle; the most important phrase for a marriage is not "compatible in bed" but it is "keeping totally committed".
Life is about the hard things, at times, and having that moral compass that says what is right and what is wrong.
