How Do You Measure a Marriage?
Some thoughts on our 25th anniversary
We sit at the small wooden table in the alley outside the swanky restaurant, slanting sunlight falling on her face, her dress, her hands. The cocktail glasses sweat lazily in the August afternoon, each a jumble of ice and mint and the light foam of shaken drinks. Monday traffic eases down Prince Street behind her. The city sounds are a welcome soundtrack.
How do you measure a marriage?
How do you measure 25 years?
The waiter with the tattoo on his forearm thanks us. We leave the restaurant and walk a slow circuit around this city that we love, stopping for ice cream, walking past our old church, Saint James Episcopal, remembering the days not so long ago when we lived here among the traffic, the sirens, the cracked sidewalks. Holding hands.
How do you measure a marriage? Is there a weight to it, a distance? Can you place it on a scale and balance it with the mass of something else?
Five years ago, on our 20th anniversary, we were in the middle of a lean year, so we spent a few nights at my uncle and aunt’s beach house (for free) and spent the weekend eating ice cream, reading, and watching emotionally devastating movies, including A Star is Born. Maile cried most of the rest of the evening after that one. We had poured every last penny we had into the beginning of a new business at the Maryland State Fair. Everything felt tenuous. But we were used to it.
Ten years ago we had just moved into the city of Lancaster and Leo was a month old. We were waking up to the city. It was the beginning of a new era, an era of the seven of us, our oldest nearly teenagers.
Fifteen years ago, we were in the middle of making the decision to leave Virginia, leave our community, our friends, a home we loved, because my painting business was in free fall. I was embarking on a journey into making a living as a freelance co-writer and ghostwriter. We said we we would give it six months and see how it went. It’s still going.
Twenty years ago we lived in England. Cade had just turned one. Lucy was four months from being born. In the spring we woke to the sounds of lambs bleating for their mothers in the back pasture; in winter, the never-ending drizzle tapped on the glass. Those were four years in a fairytale, four years in the Cotswolds that felt like Narnia, nearly impossible now to believe we ever lived them.
Twenty-five years ago we were getting ready for our wedding. I spent the night prior at my cousins’ house playing video games and staring out into the dark woods behind their house, finding it hard to believe I was going to get married. I was 22 and Maile had just turned 21. We went to Canada on our honeymoon and stayed in a friend’s cabin with no running water, took steaming hot sponge baths in the kitchen and dips in the freezing cold lake. We had no idea what the weight of a year might be, the density of a decade, how the days can pass so slowly, how the weeks and the months can fly at such high rates of speed, how someone you love so dearly can make you crazy, angry, sad. And yet somehow that same person could fill you full of hope, sanity, contentment, happiness.
How do you measure a week when you are fighting, upset over this or that?
How do you measure a sleepless night? A night on the couch?
How do you measure an evening in a bed and breakfast in the Lake District, afternoon hikes where you emerge from pine-laden paths into clearings that hold entire lakes at the top of mountains?
The amount of time between a baby’s birth and a doctor saying, “It’s a girl!”? Or, “It’s a boy!” Or the time it takes for an ultrasound tech to turn from the screen and say, “I’m sorry.”
How can you measure?
This year, as we approached our 25th anniversary, we weren’t sure if we’d be able to find the time to do anything special. “Then we got a bookstore” has become our new way of ending sentences.
“We were going to put away all our winter coats in April . . . then we got a bookstore.”
“We were going to spend two weeks in Florida this summer . . . then we got a bookstore.”
“We were going to take some kind of a big trip for our 25th anniversary . . . then we got a bookstore.”
But as the date approached, we still wanted to do SOMETHING to celebrate the landmark, and in some last-minute scrambling we reserved a corner room close to the top of the Lancaster Marriott. My mom and our two older kids said they could handle all the taxiing of children to various practices and events. Our son would open the bookstore Tuesday morning so we wouldn’t have to rush back to real life.
So, we’ve spent the last 18 hours mostly 14 stories above this beautiful city. We ate ice cream. We talked about each of our children and the bookstore. We watched the movie, You Hurt My Feelings, about a novelist who overhears her husband tell a friend he didn’t actually like his wife’s latest novel. It’s a movie about relationships, about the little white lies we tell to the ones we love, and about how much we look to those around us for affirmation and presence.
It had a melancholy feel, but nothing like A Star is Born.
How do you measure a marriage?
How do you measure 25 years?
We walk back to the car, carrying our bags, stopping at Central Market for a late-morning bite to eat. The city comes alive on market days, and it’s another beautiful August day: blue sky, sun shining off the high windows, the trees in the city green and with us.
I leave Maile in the bookstore and get the car from the garage, drive home to another day.
Another afternoon.
How do you measure a marriage?
With words. A writer measures a marriage with words. Beautifully put.
My favorite post yet. I loved the images I could see as I read.
My twenty-something-year-old cousin recently told my mom that his parents should just pull the plug on their relationship because it is full of such ups and downs. She replied, “LIFE is full of ups and downs.” I heard that right when we were in the thick of sick children and no sleep and found that it took the pressure off. Sometimes you just have to ride the waves until the break comes.