My husband and I have been married for over twenty-one years. In our society, that’s a long time. Yet for us, it doesn’t seem like it. Sometimes we feel like newlyweds and sometimes we feel like we have been married forever. We know that being married is hard work and every day we choose to love each other and commit to our marriage.
The other day, my husband told me someone asked him about our secret to longevity in marriage. He said it was that we are each other’s favorite person, and we want to spend time with each other more than anyone else. I think he is right, but I think it is more than that.
For both of us, marriage wasn’t just a ceremony and a societal contract. It was a religious and spiritual ritual binding our lives together through God. It is one situation to stand in front of a judge and get married. It is a totally different circumstance to go through religious instruction and counseling, and then stand before God and join my life to that of my husband’s in the eyes of God. From that day forward, I stopped thinking in terms of myself and started thinking in terms of ourselves. Nothing was just about me anymore. Even when it came it my career, I still included my husband in the decision-making process because those decisions impacted our life.
There’s a fine line between losing yourself in a relationship and recognizing yourself as one part of a whole. I guess the best example is the yin and yang symbol. Each side is separate and you can distinguish which part is yin and with part is yang and yet the two sides make one symbol. That’s marriage. We are two people with two separate identities, but we go through this life together as one. The glue that binds us together is God and our love for one another.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
