20 Years!!

Today is the twentieth anniversary of my marriage.  How vividly I remember entering the Church on my father's arm, sucking up my urge to cry ( I always cry at weddings) plastering a beaming smile on my face and walking up the aisle where my intended awaited.  He was scoring a whopping 10 on the handsome scale that day.  Twenty years is a pretty long stretch, where do the years go?  In that time we , like every married couple, have had to deal with the whole gamut of life events, from the very traumatic and confronting to the delightful. But mostly we have faced the mundane.  The daily round of repetitive, mind numbing, soul sapping drudgery of domesticity.

Thankfully my beloved is a lot of fun.  I do not always reveal my appreciation of this intrinsic quality but when faced with soul sapping drudgery it's good to choose a life partner with a sense of humour.

There is nothing I enjoy more than a well written romantic novel.  I am heavily into escapist entertainment.  The assured happy ending and the idea that there is a love of your life is very uplifting but it doesn't really translate to real life.  Frankly I am not the stuff that romantic heroines are made of.  Relationships appear to be all about timing, sharing common values and goals, loyalty and commitment and good luck.  The two impassioned lovers from the pages of novels only need each other but, in my opinion, you also need outside interests and good friends.

Recently I read a pretty mediocre book called "The J. M. Barrie Ladies Swimming Society" by Barbara J. Zitwer.  What drew me to this novel was that it centred around a group of elderly women whose friendship had sustained them for more than fifty years.  Their club had a manifesto which included the following key points:

• no member shall be criticized for alcoholic drinking in excess or not drinking at all
• above all, members shall listen to each other with compassion, help each other to see the sunshine in their darkest hour and to feel the new adventure in their hearts.  

I am having two tee shirts made.

Years ago when I sat down with my friends in high school imagining if we'd still be friends in ten or twenty years, our minds could not grasp a point in time beyond the Year 2000.  "How old will you be in the year 2000?" we would ask bug-eyed at the prospect of being so geriatric.

So this is all uncharted territory.  We are now well beyond the Year 2000 (and I still have my stockpile of survivalist essentials).  Still I can go forward into the future knowing that I have at my side a partner who understands and grounds me.  As one of my friends commented long ago, "Who else would have you?"  With these heartening words ringing in my ears I am ready to embrace the next twenty years.