Thoughts on Marriage

As someone who has been happily (for the most part) married to my one and only spouse for 38 years), here are some things I've learned.

A good rule is, only one person gets to be crazy at a time!

A traditional marriage works best if you can pull it off. My husband and I have always had clearly defined roles. He would be the bread winner and build his career, in order to provide monetary sustenance for the family and our lives together.

In turn, I would be the child bearer, nurturer, house keeper, cook, nutritionist, household shopper, budgeter, social planner, etc.etc.etc.

Growing up relatively poor, and supporting myself totally since the age of 17, I was already somewhat of an expert in budgeting. He, the son of a prominent Memphis surgeon, had never had to think about money growing up! In the early years, there were some conflicts because of our much different backgrounds in this regard!

There would be necessary "spaces in our togetherness" (Kahil Gibran). Having him in a job that has always required a fair amount of travel took care of that.

I believe allowing each other some "breathing room" and the freedom to pursue our own hobbies and passions has been a large part of our success together.

We would both be responsible for keeping the marrige alive in the romance dept. and always put our relationship first.
The fact that we married fairly young (23 and 21), meant we entered the relaionship with relatively little emotional "baggage". We also did not live together before marriage, as was just beginning to be accepted in the late sixties, and is a lot more common in today's culture.

There have certainly been a lot of rough patches over the years, but we have weathered them together, because we were committed to each other and the marriage. It's not all about personal "happiness", especially when children are involved.

We are really beginning to reap the rewards of maintaining a stable marriage all of these years, in terms of a fairly comfortable lifestyle, wonderful, responsible, successful children who have begun great families of their own, providing us with life's greatest "fruits", our grandchldren. We are very blessed to have all of them living close by.