It Takes Two

People ask me sometimes what it takes to stay married that long. Fifty-eight years, near enough — we’ll be over fifty-eight this time around. And they seem to think there must be some big secret to it, some trick I’ve been keeping. There isn’t. I’ll tell you plain what it takes. It takes two people. That’s the first thing. It takes forgiving and forgetting, and it takes listening to each other. That’s all it takes. That’s the whole of it.

Now, I won’t sit here and tell you it was a perfect marriage. It wasn’t. It was a good one. A good marriage, apart from perfect — and those are two different things. There are things I wish had been different, and I’ll own that. And she could probably sit right where I’m sitting and say the very same thing about me, that there were things she’d have had another way. Well, all right. That’s how it is. You take it and you move on. That’s what you do.

Nobody ever explained any of this to me, you understand. Nobody counseled us about marriage, about what all it involves. And nobody counseled us about money either, which was its own trouble later. We just got married. We got married and we went to work and we figured it out as we went. Made a few mistakes, and you learn from them, and you move on. That was the method. I do wish, though, that somebody had sat me down and explained to me a little bit more what marriage is all about, and what all is involved in it. Because there’s a lot involved. More than a young fellow knows.

Here’s the promise we made, the two of us, on the day we were married. We made it right to each other. What happened yesterday would not come up today anymore. That was the promise. Whatever it was — it stayed in the day it happened, and it did not follow you into the next morning. And I’ll tell you, I have kept that promise many a hard night. I have gone to bed very upset. Almost mad. Many nights, lying there in the dark, just about mad. And in the morning I would wake up, and it was love. Love again. That’s what you choose. But you have to choose it, is the thing. You have to practice every single day. You have to work on love every day, because Satan is right there every morning, right from the time you open your eyes, trying to find something — anything — to disturb it. He’s looking for the crack. Every day he’s looking. So every day you work.

And talking — you’d better talk. There have been many times I did not feel like talking to Grandma. Many times. I just didn’t have it in me that day, didn’t want to. But hey — if you want to make it, you better talk. That’s just how it goes. You don’t get to go quiet and still keep the thing. It doesn’t work that way.

Now, my biggest problem, if I’m honest about it, and I’ll be honest — it’s my nature to talk sharp sometimes. Somehow that’s just in me, to talk a little mean. And once I get going a little bit excited, once I get loud, people think I’m mad. They think I’m all worked up and angry. And a lot of times Grandma thinks I’m mad when I haven’t even thought about being mad. I mean it — I haven’t even had the thought cross my mind, and there she is thinking I’m boiling over. I am not mad. That’s just the voice on me. But I know it lands that way, and that’s my own thing to watch.

There’s one thing I have never done, though, not once, and I can’t for the life of me understand the men who do it. How can a man hit his wife? How? She’s your best friend. She is your best friend in the whole world. You can’t hit your best friend. That hitting drama — that has never, ever once been done in my house. Never. I can’t even get my head around it.

I’ll tell you something that people don’t like to hear me say. I could have never done one thing for my family, and that’s leave. I could never have left Grandma and just gone. Now don’t misunderstand me — there were many times I felt like packing up and running. Many times. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But you’d better start asking yourself a question when that feeling comes on you. Where do you want to run to? Where exactly are you going? It’s like Peter said to Jesus — “where else should we go?” There’s nowhere. There’s nowhere to go. And besides that, when you leave, you do more damage to your kids and your family than to anybody else in the world. The most damage falls on them. Not on you. On them.

And here’s the other piece of it that people miss. When you divorce, you think you’re leaving your problem behind. You’re not. You take your problem right along with you. The real problem starts once you have the divorce — that’s when the trouble really gets going. Look at a lot of these homeless people you see around these days. A lot of them — those are people who came out of broken-up families. They’ve got nowhere to go. No support. Nobody. That’s where a lot of it starts, if you follow it back far enough.

Back where I come from, in the colony, there was no such thing as divorce. No such thing. You didn’t even have the word for it, hardly. It just wasn’t done. Though I’ll tell you, they do divorces there now too. Even there. Even in the colonies now. Times change everywhere, I guess.

There’s one more thing I’ll say, and it’s about age and energy, and I want to say it right. My own dad was ten years older than my mom. Ten years. And when they were young, that was fine, that was nothing at all, you’d never notice it. But when they got older — well, then that’s a difference. You feel those ten years then. And I’ve seen the same thing with Grandma’s sister, who’s ten or eleven years younger than her husband. When you’re younger you’ve got so much energy, and your partner hasn’t got it anymore, and there she was still full of go when he had none left. So a big gap is a hard thing as the years come on. Ours is just a little over two years, mine and Grandma’s, and that works. That’s a good gap. That works fine.

But I’ll tell you, even so — Grandma sometimes thinks I ought to have the same energy I had ten years ago. And I have to say to her, “now look. Look at my age. Look at how I have slaved all my life. All my life I have slaved. And now you’re wondering where the energy went. Well, I don’t have it.” I don’t have the energy I had ten years ago, and that’s the plain truth of it. I slaved it away, every bit of it, and I’d do it again. But you can’t ask a man of my years for the go he had a decade back. It’s just not in there anymore.