Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Marriage survival has become some kind of feat

By Carl Heintze

These days being married (to the same person) for 43 years seems some kind of achievement. When half of all marriages fail, being a part of one that's survived that long is some kind of a feat, although I'm not sure what kind.

As the other half of this one says, "It's not some kind of athletic contest. We're not keeping score."

I guess not. It's not the length, but the quality that counts, right?

Still I remain impressed by the fact that that much time, more than four decades, has gone by since we stood in the First Congregational Church in San Bernardino on a very hot June afternoon and said our vows.

The church is long gone, torn down for make way for condominiums, the minister has passed to his reward and the maid of honor and her soon-to-be-husband are no longer married. More's the pity. They started going together before we did, but they split. Somehow we survived. I can't really tell you how. I can't say we survived in spite of many difficulties because there don't seem to have been many. Not that it was all wedded bliss. We dealt with our own children's marital difficulties, with our parents' deaths, with moving to a new house, with travel in many strange and wonderful places.

Fortunately, we retained good health and sufficient wealth to enjoy our retirement. Was that intentional, an accident or luck? I can't say. I only know it happened, that we went from there to here and it seems to have been an easy, wonderful journey.

Yet when I look back through the pages of our joint history I see we passed through the Korean War and Vietnam, the national disenchantment of the 1960s and '70s, the greed of the '80s, through a long list of natural and man-made disasters.

They rumbled along in the background as we got our children through high school and college, saw them married and with children, separated and with children, remarried and approaching middle age.

Somehow it was their problems and not ours that seemed paramount.

In retrospect, it seems somehow unbelievable that we've spent almost all of our life together in California--we were both born here and never really wanted to live anywhere else--and that as California changed, we were able to accommodate the changes it brought. How fortunate we were not to have been born and brought up in some other place, say Bosnia or Iran or wherever change portended violence and even death.

Whatever happened in the world was important, but it wasn't as important as our life together.

Yet I wouldn't want you to think 43 years passed without disagreement or change on our part. Looking back now, none of the disagreements seem major; indeed, none of them seem to have been retained as the baggage which has accompanied us to this point in time. Fortunately, we can't really recapture the persons we were 43 years ago. We are what we have become.

Or as the poet Robert Frost wrote--words Wallace Stegner used as a title for a novel--we have crossed to safety.

What I think that means is that we have lived not two separate lives but a single one; that we have become not two persons who are married but, rather, a marriage; that instead of four feet, we have two that propel us in the same direction and make us carry out tasks in the same way.

Our behaviors have become so intertwined that we do things anticipating what the other will do or think or say as we do them.

Of course, that makes the final separation, which is inevitable, very difficult. It's not something we want to contemplate even as we see it happening to friends around us. At the same time, such a long bondage only strengthens not only the physical but the spiritual bond between us. It makes it easier to believe we will be able to maintain it in the worst of circumstances.

All around us friends and acquaintances are celebrating their golden wedding anniversaries, 50 years of togetherness. It seems to them and to us some kind of milestone. But no more than 43 years, or 44.

For every year is a blessing and every anniversary a reward. Start up the music; it's time to dance that waltz.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.