This year, Easter happened to fall on hubby’s and my wedding anniversary. We’ve been married 80 years—40 for him and 40 for me. Math jokes aside, at times it does feel we’ve always been together. Other times, it seems like the wedding was just a last week.
Someone asked if we celebrated big on our anniversary, but we’re not much into fancy shindigs. We enjoyed going through pictures and reminiscing with our kids, laughing at hairstyles and how young we looked.
Even forty years ago, our wedding was pretty simple. It had to be since we paid for everything ourselves. Hubby had been on his own for several years and didn’t feel right asking his parents to help us out. And my mom was a widow on very limited income.
I sewed my own wedding dress and the bridesmaids sewed theirs. My maid of honor had taken a cake decorating class and made our beautiful wedding cake. Another friend catered the rehearsal dinner and the reception. A co-worker of mine decorated and provided the flowers and bouquet, and one of hubby’s co-workers did the photography. Having so many friends involved made it all the more meaningful.
Since we were also buying a house, we kept the honeymoon simple, too. We’d planned to go camping in east Texas and explore some of the historical sites. The weather in Houston leading up to the wedding was high 80s and humid.
But the week after the wedding in east Texas? Temperatures stayed in the 40s and it rained. Every. Single. Day. We ended up staying in inexpensive hotels and going home a day early. Of course, the day we returned home the sun came out and the weather was perfect. Another memory to laugh and tell the kids about.
Thankfully, a marriage is much more than a wedding or a honeymoon. We may start out with stars in our eyes but at some point, we must plant our feet on the ground and do the hard work of learning to live with someone whose habits and preferences and desires are likely different from ours. In my experience, “Happily Ever After” is a myth because there will always be times of conflict and disagreement, times of illness, financial hardship, and times when you just don’t like your spouse very much.
That’s why you’ll find little or no romance in my books. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I know many, many readers don’t have any trouble with romance novels. But for me, I found they distorted my sense of what a love relationship should be, leaving me with unrealistic expectations.
Even after I married, I became dissatisfied with my hubby when he didn’t respond or act like the heroes in the books I was reading. Fortunately, I realized the problem was the books and my unrealistic expectations, not my dear husband who expressed his love in so many other ways.
And really, 40 years of expressing your love for one another day after day—I think that’s a celebration in itself.
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