For marriage to be a success, every woman and
every man should have his or her own bathroom.
CATHERINE ZETA-JONES
A good marriage is like an incredible retirement fund.
You put everything you have into it during your productive
life, and over the years it turns from silver to gold to platinum.
WILLARD SCOTT
My wife is eight months older than me. No one believes this. You see the two of us together and you’ll see why. One of us looks like George Burns, and the other like, well, like my wife. Ramona was standing in the grocery store the other day, and a lady asked, “Is it your dad who writes those books?”
“Yes,” she replied, past a widening smile.
One day my wife looked at my white hair and said, “When I agreed to grow old with you, I didn’t mean this rapidly.”
Last August we celebrated twenty-five years of married life—most of them good ones. When I was a boy, the only people celebrating twenty-fifth anniversaries were very old people with ample wrinkles, high foreheads, and starchy clothing—people who were so old they had reached their forties and needed help getting up stairs. Most of them seemed happy. Others looked like love was a dream and marriage was the alarm clock.
I consider ours a miracle marriage, especially when you consider that I proposed to Ramona via chain letter. This is what it said:
Dear Ramona Bjorndal,
Do not throw this letter away! This chain letter was started by my ancestors just after the Great Flood and it has NEVER EVER BEEN BROKEN! To keep the chain going, all you have to do is marry me. This will include providing decent meals, clean laundry, and lots of love for the next sixty years. In return, you will receive my undying devotion, occasional flowers, chocolate, and access to my car keys until death do us part. If you break the chain, you will be destined to live a life of misery and boredom, much like the math class we are now sitting in.
It was pretty clever stuff for a tenth grader, don’t you think? And four years later, when I summoned the courage to show it to her, she laughed. And agreed to marry me anyway.
In August, we took leave of our teenagers and returned to the same hotel where we first shared a pillow all those years ago. The staff, impressed that a couple could stay together this long, couldn’t spoil us enough. They wheeled in complimentary chocolates, chocolate-dipped strawberries, and a large bottle of champagne on ice, which we mistook for bubble bath and used accordingly.
As we dove into the chocolates, we talked about some pretty sweet years together. I suppose there are a thousand reasons we still share the same phone number and address; here are just a few:
We sweat the small stuff. Early on I left mud on the carpet and whiskers in the sink. I even left my underwear where it landed. I’m learning to take care of the small things before they become big ones. If I’m last out of bed, I make it. (I have done this twice.) If I’m late for supper, I call home. We go to bed at the same time even when I’m not tired, and I kiss her lips before I shave each morning. Just the other day, I even—drum roll, please—located the laundry hamper.
We golf together. Ramona enjoys golf about as much as I enjoy shopping for curtain fabric. Still, she comes along sometimes and cheers as I putt. This is annoying, but I love having her there. One of our anniversaries was even celebrated, at her suggestion, on a golf course. Perhaps that’s why I find it easier to do the dishes, vacuum carpets, bathe the dog, or move furniture whenever she asks—which is often in the middle of the night.
We eat together. Whenever possible, we eat meals together, believing mealtime to be an enormously important time of the day. We even cook together, though we seldom agree on recipes. Before we had children we were often invited out for meals. (We were invited out only once when our three were small. I imagine that the gracious elderly couple who did the inviting are still chipping food off their walls.) We would be eating some new dish, and Ramona would be savoring each mouthful. “I need to get this recipe,” she would say. And I would be looking at her with horror because I was stuffing bite-sized pieces of sandwich in my pockets whenever our host wasn’t looking. And so we worked out a signal. When we’re invited out and she asks for a recipe, and I don’t like the food, I say, “It’s tasty.” Tasty is code for “this tomato flambé tastes exactly like a skunk swam through it. Don’t, under any circumstances, bring home the recipe.”
We practice forgiveness. One of my favorite quotes comes from Frederick Buechner: “Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”11 My brother Tim likes to put it more simply: “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison, then standing around waiting for the rat to die.”
We travel together. Whenever possible, Ramona goes along with me on a trip. Sure, it costs money, and I haven’t had a window seat in years, but I’d like to grow old with someone who doesn’t just share my money, she shares my memories.
We left no alternatives. The first three years of our marriage were miserable. Until I got a divorce. A divorce from loving myself and seeking my own way. I was reading the book of Galatians one night when I stumbled on the verse, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (2:20), and the most profound thought hit me: If I am dead, and Christ lives in me, can my wife see Him there? (Here’s a tip: If you want to have a miserable marriage, don’t read the Bible.) Finding the right person, I have since discovered, is less important than being the right person. The happiest married people I know discovered early on that the “better” comes after the “worse.”
We pray together. This was one of Ramona’s first wishes for our marriage. And after reading that Bible verse, I came to honor it. We’ve since discovered that couples who pray together regularly report “the most satisfying marriages of all.”12 Lately, Ramona and I have been thanking God at night for His amazing grace. For taking two selfish kids who hardly knew how to spell love and pulling them close to Himself and to each other.
On our way to the hotel I turned on the radio to hear Huey Lewis singing, “I’m happy to be stuck with you.” I tapped my toes (this irritates my wife when I’m driving) and smiled. But glue or chains don’t hold a marriage together. A hundred tiny threads do. Threads like trust, commitment, kindness, humility, gentleness, respect, and finding the laundry hamper.
As we checked in, I told our hostess the significance of this day. Her eyes grew wide. “Wow,” she said, “that’s a long time with one person!”
“Yes,” I replied with a grin, “but it would have been a whole lot longer without her.”
