The day-to-day stuff that makes a marriage

Today is our 33rd anniversary. We were married on June 6, 1992, nearly one-third of a century and six U.S. presidents ago.

Relationships, particularly marriages, are very much about such milestones, but you only have so many of these big moments along the way.

What you have a lot more of is the stuff of life. You get one honeymoon and several thousand trips to the grocery store. One wedding and countless trash pick-up days. One each of your silver and gold anniversaries, and many hundred times each of cutting the grass and going to your kids' sporting events and school concerts.

This is not at all to take the romance out of marriage. I've just found that the deepest connection comes from the shared experience of late-night newborn feedings, exhausting family vacations in the minivan, sitting together reading quietly in the living room, and working as a team to catch the little mouse your cats have cornered in the basement.

It's worried discussions over finances, small compromises that keep the peace, gently making fun of each others' little faults, and laughing way too hard at the dumb joke you asked Alexa to tell at bedtime, right before you turn out the lights and both fall asleep.

It's kids' drawings on the side of the fridge, dust balls in the corner of the kitchen no one has the energy to clean up, and going together to the vet to put down a beloved old pet who will never be healthy again.

It's all of that and many other things you won't find preserved in a scrapbook but that are the substance of a lifelong commitment.

Today that's what I celebrate. Not so much the fact that it happens to be exactly 33 years, but rather the often-forgotten but deeply valuable, minute-by-minute reality of life spent as a couple.

It's worth celebrating. Every bit of it.

We're going to have a wedding in the family

 

Recently my son Jared proposed to his longtime girlfriend Lyndsey, and she said yes.

None of this was a surprise to us. It was eventually going to happen and was just a matter of when.

Lyndsey and Jared have been together for nearly eight years. They went to the same high school but didn't become a couple until the summer after graduation. As I often say, she is as much a member of our family as any of our kids, as Elissa's boyfriend Mark, or as Chloe's husband Michael.

Now it becomes legal.

Whenever this wedding occurs, it will be the first involving one of our kids. Chloe and Michael have been hitched for 5 1/2 years, but they never had an actual wedding (though not for lack of trying).

They were married by a judge back in October 2019, in part because Chloe was beginning her academic research career and wanted to change her name before she began publishing. This was to maintain consistency and avoid any confusion further down the line.

Their plan was to have a formal wedding in June 2020, but you might remember a little pandemic that popped up a few months prior to that, causing them to push the wedding to October 2020.

That little pandemic refused to cooperate, though, and eventually their wedding was cancelled altogether.

So Jared and Lyndsey's big day will be Terry's and my first time as parents of the groom/bride.

As I write this, we don't yet have a date or a location for that wedding. But whenever it is, it's going to be quite the shindig, I'm sure. These kids have a large army of family and friends who love them and want to be there when they tie the knot.

I can't wait. It's not often I get to show off my Hokey Pokey AND Chicken Dance skills in the same night.

32 years later, here we are

 

This shot was taken many years after we were married, but it was a re-creation of a photo we took on our honeymoon in 1992 at Universal Studios in Florida.

This post should technically appear here on the blog tomorrow, seeing as how Terry and I celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary on June 6th and not today. But my Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule yields to no milestone or special occasion, thus making me 24 hours early in wishing my bride a very happy anniversary.

However long you've been married, you can't help but notice, as the number creeps higher and higher, that the years pass impossibly fast. Father Time is, without a doubt, undefeated.

And he's running up the score on some of us.

I am grateful for everything and everyone I have in my life, but my wife is at the top of that list. I don't necessarily deserve someone as wonderful as she is, but I take some small amount of credit for recognizing that fact and being grateful for her.

Thirty-two years ago tonight we had our wedding rehearsal and rehearsal dinner. I look back at those grainy old videos and realize we were just kids at the time. I was 22 years old, having only graduated from college a few weeks earlier. Terry was 23.

And here we are now, somewhat older than 22 and 23.

Our kids marvel at the fact that we were married so young, and even more so at the fact we were the parents of three children before either of us had turned 30.

It was a different time. Everyone lives life in their own way and at their own pace.

Our chosen pace, in those early years, was "frantic."

As I type this in mid-May, I have no idea what Terry and I will do tomorrow night to mark the passing of 32 years. Probably dinner out and an early return home to watch TV. (EDITOR'S NOTE: It turns out we'll be attending a playoff hockey game...at the insistence of my awesome wife.)

Happy anniversary to the best wife a guy could ask for. Without her, this blog could only be called "5 Kids," and well, that just wouldn't be as exciting.

Marrying young...however you define "young" nowadays

On this day 70 years ago (April 18, 1951), my parents got married.

Mom had just turned 19 a week earlier, while Dad was all of 21. At the time, it was not unusual to be married at those ages.

Fast forward 41 years to June 6, 1992. That was the day Terry and I were married. She was 23 and I was 22. I had just graduated from college a few weeks earlier. That's us in the photo above.

Again, while we were probably younger than most people becoming husband and wife back then, it's not like we were inordinately young for the early 90s.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average age for a first marriage in 2020 was 28.1 for women and 30.5 for men. What's more, fewer than 30% of Americans ages 18-34 are now married, vs. nearly 60% as recently as 1978.

Clearly, young people in this country are not in a rush to put a ring on it. At least not any time soon.

I'm not saying this is good or bad. It just is.

By the time Terry and I tied the knot, we had been together for more than six years. I had decided long before that she was The One, and she had clearly decided that, for all of the warning signs of what lay ahead for her, she was willing to tie her fortunes to me.

It's not like we met when we were 20 and got married a year or two later, which was common in our parents' generation. We knew each other really well and were great friends in addition to being a couple.

As we approach our 29th anniversary, I would say it worked out pretty well for us. I know others our age with similar stories.

All of which is to say that whatever the demographic trends are, being "too young" to marry is a pretty subjective thing. I got engaged when I was 18 and had people tell me that was nuts and that we should wait a bit. I knew they were wrong.

Others are clearly not ready to enter into a long-term commitment when they actually do, and more often than not, those unions end in divorce.

Maybe it's good that people are waiting until they're more financially and emotionally stable before taking the plunge nowadays. All I know is, I was basically a kid when I got married and it's still the best decision of my life.

Your results may vary.