Seven years? No itching yet...

Today the missus and I mark our 7th wedding anniversary. It's been quite a ride since we said our vows on a humid August day near the banks of the Potomac.

In the intervening time, we've moved from Washington, DC to Minneapolis, Minnesota. We've had career changes. Upgraded cars. Bought a house. She went to law school and became a lawyer. I briefly ran a nonprofit. And the big change, we squeezed out two darling kids--the oldest now mere weeks from starting kindergarten.

Recent marriage surveys have looked at the "seven year itch," that moment in the marriage where things supposedly get stale and eyes begin to wander. Supposedly, it is more like the "sometime between 1 to 8 year s itch". A major factor identified in marriage failures during this time is the stress associated with having young children. (News alert! Having children is demanding and stressful!)



Last winter while grocery shopping with my one year old, I had the "pleasure" of having a random retired priest quiz me on my family situation so that he could give some unsolicited advice and make nonsensical marriage jokes. His view was that the five year mark was the real hill and it was smoother sailing after that.

Despite his expert views (not) rooted in personal experience and the media portrayal of all the social science research, I know that relationships are always work. Sure, there are ups and downs and periods of adjustment. But you're never going to maintain a healthy relationship by sitting on your ass and paying it no mind.

***

So, seven years ago today we were married. It was to be a beautiful outside ceremony on the banks of the Potomac, just outside of Washington, DC. We woke up that Saturday to a perfect day. Kid cousins went swimming mid-day at the nearby mini-water park. We took pictures before the ceremony. The sun was shining and it was about 80 degrees.

Then the dark clouds rolled in. Within 15 minutes, the wind began slapping trees around. The sky was dark. Instead of 4:00 PM, it looked like it was 9:00 PM. It didn't look good. We were not going to be married outside.

Fortunately, we had a Plan B: Get married at the reception site, which was conveniently located 100 feet away. As the last pictures were snapped, the rain came and we ran to the building.

This is what it looked like that evening in nearby DC. Several metro stations were flooded. A couple people were unable to come to the wedding due to flooded cars.

Picture borrowed from weatherbook.com

According to some superstition, rain on your wedding day is good luck and not, as Alanis Morissette sings, ironic. One couple suggested that we should "buy lottery tickets NOW" under this logic. The downpour continued until about 10:00 PM, but we got married anyways.

On our one month anniversary, we found ourselves fleeing the center of DC on September 11th and returning that evening to our Capitol Hill apartment feeling we were now living in a military state. On our one year anniversary we were making an offer to buy a house in Longfellow neighborhood of friendly Minneapolis. On our second anniversary, the missus was 35 weeks pregnant.

And here we are now. Two kids. In the same house. I can only speak for myself, but no itching yet. We'll look at our wedding pictures this evening and remark how young we look. (We were 22 and 23 for chrissakes!) In many ways, in the seven years we've become an old married couple. We feel like we veterans who know it all. (We also thought we knew at all at the tender age of 23.)

At the same time, it feels like the wedding was just yesterday. It seems just a short time ago that we were getting our rings on a lunch break and the jewelry salesman was telling us in his North African accent about the "low comfort fit" of the ring in question. Whatever that means.

***

Now seven years wiser is there anything I would do differently? For one, I wouldn't have taken the ceremony so seriously. It's not that we didn't have a healthy perspective at the time. We had a relatively informal event. Family and friends stayed in cabins on site. We got married by a Unitarian minister. Our rehearsal dinner was an outside picnic featuring food from a Lebanese deli. (My grandmother in law had humus for the first time!) Our flower centerpieces were constructed by a couple of aunts who were given $120 and sent to the farmer's market. We served a vegan, lemon poppyseed cake that looked nothing like the traditional wedding cake. We were comfortable doing our own thing and not getting hung up on tradition or an unattainable ideal.

But we took the wedding ceremony so seriously. We weren't bothered by the rain too much. It was the words and the symbolism of the ceremony we put our stock in. In the weeks and months before the wedding, we debated extensively whether to have this reading or that reading and what every aspect said about us and our relationship. Really, who is going to remember whether we had a reading from Desmond Tutu or the Dalai Lama? (I barely recall.) I believe the whole ceremony was 40 minutes. If planning one the wedding today, I'd be focused on a ceremony ten minutes tops.

What matters most of all was not the detailed symbolism of every aspect of the ceremony, but the fact that we were committing ourselves to each other and were able to include so many people important to us. Indeed, our commitment to each other wasn't even made at the wedding, but when we got engaged ten months earlier at Lincoln Park on our way back from Blockbuster Video. Or maybe the commitment was made before the official engagement, when we first discussed the possibilities of marriage and children. Or maybe it was when we decided to move to DC together sans jobs two weeks after we graduated from college.

If you would have asked me just two years before August 11, 2001 where I'd be at my current age of 30, married seven years with two kids wouldn't have been my first, second, or even third prediction. I had pictured myself moving around the country, traveling abroad, and going to graduate school throughout my 20s. I'd save my 30s for settling down and having a family, preferably after I was on tenure track at some decent university. Instead, at 30, I've been happily married for seven years and enjoying being an at home dad for two wonderful girls. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Proposal

Here's one way to propose:


From Found Magazine. Original posting here.

Today's Quote: Marriage

This month's Atlantic magazine features an essay that no doubt sparks a bit of controversy: The Case for settling for Mr. Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb. It's a lengthy and thoughtful piece, written from the perspective of a woman in her 40s who has decided to have a child by herself, attributing her lack of husband to being too picky in her 20s and 30s.

She questions what it means to be single and what it means to be married. At one point she describes marriage in the following, non-romantic way:

"It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way."

I guess it's a little more optimistic than Marge Simpson, who once said: "Marriage is a constant battle for moral superiority." Or more on point, Edna Krabappel who said, "Ha ha ha. Children, most of you will never fall in love, but marry out of fear of dying alone."

Still, the comparison with running a nonprofit enterprise strikes me as spot on. I would say that it is definitely desirable to want to take vacations with your spouse, though. In fact, I think taking a trip with someone is a great test to the long-term potential of the relationship. You are in close proximity for a length of time. It's an opportunity to connect and have fun together. And of course all traveling involves lots of opportunities to negotiate and deal with unanticipated problems compounded by lack of sleep and stress!

In all seriousness, Gottlieb makes some good points about how we think about romance and marriage. She theorizes that "settling" means more and is increasingly difficult the older you get because you get more set in your ways and accustomed to the independence of being single. Still, there is much to criticize. It is hard for me to understand the perspective of a never-married, single mother in her 40s on issues of marriage, but she has a bit too much confidence with some of her assertions.

Like this one: "...every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.

"Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous."

My guess is that there are plenty of single 30 year-old women who are not in denial and perfectly fine not jumping on the marriage bandwagon. Here's one right off the bat from Feministing.com. (The shortened response is here.) Yes, there may be a large segment of the population that has unrealistic expectations of marriage and child-rearing and find themselves running out of time. But I doubt it is universal. Hardly anything is.

Be nice to the missus, or pay up!

The Washington Post carries a story about the state of marriages in Japan and how new pension regulations may be leading to a dramatic increase in divorce. I have no knowledge on how marriages in Japan work, or whether the picture painted in this article is accurate, but it has a few eyebrow-raising quotes.

From a 60-something married woman:

"Up until my 60th birthday, he had not given me anything at all. But on my 60th, he sent me 60 flowers."

"There was only one time he said he loved me. And that time, he was standing behind me."

Learn to Be Nice to Your Wife, or Pay the Price