Silver

Here it is, a beautiful summer day, the dawn of the next quarter-century of marriage for me and mio sposo. Twenty-five years ago the sun was not shining. It was a rainy wedding day. My brothers had cleaned up the yard outside my parents’ house and no one was able to use it because it was too wet. Everyone was squished together in the living room, and after the ceremony everyone backed up, thinking that we were going to process out or something stupid like that, and our pianist friend who was about to play something appropriate to the moment was forced into the piano and couldn’t play anything at all.

Someone asked me if I had any secrets to impart on how to keep a marriage going that long, and I can honestly say that there are no secrets. But there should be. Heh heh. No, seriously folks, honesty and open communication is really all you need, oh, and love ... and respect. But mostly open communication. Oh, and something even more important, the desire to see the commitment through.

I go to weddings where the bride and groom are obviously crazy about each other, gazing into each other’s eyes with devotion, but they can’t go the distance. Something happens, usually pretty early on in the relationship, and it explodes. I don’t know what it is. No one tells me these things. But I think infidelity is a big one, especially for young guys who miss having multiple partners. They just can’t seem to get a handle on the “forsake all others” part of the wedding vow. And of course, adultery is anathema to wedded bliss, especially if the cuckolded partner finds out about it.

In the past 25 years, I have had sex with one man. He has had sex only with me, and I think that says something right there. It’s not like there haven’t been opportunities to stray, but a decision was made and stuck to that we would be each other’s exclusive partner from that day forward. And that is the secret: Make a commitment and honour it. Period.

Believe me, it has not been a smooth road, this quarter-century marriage I find myself in. It was stressful right from the beginning. We met as undergrads, but didn’t marry until after he had been pursuing a Masters for a year in a different country. I joined him but was not allowed to obtain employment due to his status. It’s actually quite amusing. Several months prior to our nuptials I had sent every single lawfirm in that city a resumé advertising my availability and two had responded and granted me interviews. Both offered me jobs and I accepted one of them. When I got back from my honeymoon, there was a letter awaiting me saying that sadly, they were unable to hire me as now that I was married to a foreign student, I wasn’t eligible for a work permit. Sucks, eh? So I found other ways to supplement our meager income: copying music for my husband’s professors and colleagues, dressmaking, typing essays. I even did some copying work for a publishing company which somehow worked around the non-permit problem. We didn’t live high off the hog, but we didn’t starve either.

Then my husband graduated and found a job in Nowheresville, Western Canada. He wanted to stay in that foreign country for another year on a post-doc which one of his professors was dangling in front of him; I wanted to start making babies, and I wanted to do it in my own home and native land. So he deferred to me and we moved. That was very stressful, not the move alone (which was an adventure, believe me), but the first year of teaching at a unversity for him, teaching at the conservatory for me (my three students were an 85-year-old lady barbershopper, a 36-year-old housewife, and a 16-year-old girl whose mother crocheted me the most beautiful baby blanket) and being pregnant with our first born, an experience which culminated in an emergency caesarian section. Then we moved again. And again. And a couple more times after that, but at least we stayed in the same town.

There have been some really bad times during this voyage we are on. I was telling a friend of mine, someone older than I am who has only ever seemed to sustain a relationship for ten years (he’s presently in one that has lasted for five years and seems pretty solid) that when you’re going through a rough spot, it feels as though the whole thing is rotten. Yet you have to remember that those bad times are few and far between, that the good times outweigh them greatly, and the bad feelings will pass, the situation will be resolved, and you’ll go back to normal, whatever that is.

And, lest we forget, love helps. If you truly love each other, if that love spreads to your children and your families and your friends, if you can be unstinting in the amount of love you lavish on those around you, then you’ll probably be fine. But if you seek to curtail that affection, keeping it all for yourself, you’re doomed. As I am constantly telling my singing students (and my blog readers, it seems), “Breath is like love; the more you give, the more you have.”

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