I always said when I got married I wasn’t going to cry at the altar, that they would be able to hear me say my vows at the back of the church.  When I did get married to Al, I was pretty damn sure that I had the right guy.  I didn’t cry, although I don’t know if I was really that loud.  I think I saw Al’s eyes tear up a bit, though.   We’ve both certainly had our share of tears since that day.  Sometimes I wonder how and why we survived.  Better people than we have stumbled and fallen while climbing this mountain.  Raising children is a daunting experience, undertaken without any notion of what it requires physically and emotionally.  I think it’s a miracle that any marriage survives that intact.   All of your seemingly inconsequential value differences that you might have had an inkling of when you walk down that aisle are magnified when you are raising children. 

We went on a cruise with the whole family for our 25th wedding anniversary.  I was in the tiny laundry room on the ship, ironing something, when a honeymooning couple came in to do their laundry (yeah, right, I’m sure they were disappointed I was in there – probably on their “places to do it” list…).  When I congratulated them and told them it was my 25th, they asked me The Question.  “What is the secret of a good marriage?”  My answer was immediate: forgive endlessly.  They both looked at each other a little confused.  They told me they had asked many people and had gotten many answers and had not heard that one.  Of course all the other stock answers are important as well: treat kindly, have a sense of humor, don’t go to bed angry.  I went on to explain the hidden truth of a long marriage: sometimes you will just hate your spouse.  No way around it.  Forever is a long time to be with one person and it doesn’t matter who it is or who you are, you will just plain get sick of each other sometimes.  Sometimes you will wonder why you put up with his or her obnoxious habit that you’ve asked him or her a hundred times to stop.  I don’t really think Al and I had more to forgive than your average married couple, but we are both pretty stubborn, so if we weren’t able to forgive one another it probably would have ended in disaster.   Of course, it isn’t over yet! 

When I go to weddings now, I want to stand up at the back of the church and say “Uh, excuse me! Excuse me!   The better or worse thing?  It has nothing to do with whether he puts the toilet seat up or down.  It has nothing to do with her leaving her hair in the sink.  It has everything to do with being so bored at times you want to run away to the desert or worse, to another person, and not doing it.  The sickness and health thing?  Just for the record, sickness does not just mean holding her hair back while she is puking from the stomach flu.  It does not just mean getting up to get him a glass of orange juice when he has a cold.   It can mean being huddled together in a single hospital bed the night before a 6 a.m. operating room appointment with the brain surgeon while your young children are home being lovingly cared for by their aunt.  The richer or poorer thing?  It doesn’t mean not having quite enough at the end of the month for a movie.  It means losing your livelihood with two kids and one in the oven, a major earthquake happening while your home is in escrow, and not blaming each other but figuring out together how to make it work.”  Of course, no one ever does that at a wedding, nor should they.  Everyone at a wedding shuts up and sends the couple forward with the same sweet hope for success we all had. 

Marriage may be the ultimate metaphor for the human condition – joy, pain, love, frustration, hilarity, anger; but most of all…..forgiveness.