What Endures?

We had our fourteenth wedding anniversary a few weeks back. It was nice- we saw an excellent Write Club, thought we were caught in a tornado and had Costa Rican food. It felt solid, but not overly romantic or gushy and that's fine. Due to what we thought might be a tornado, we scooted back to pick up the boys earlier than we might have to rescue them from said impending tornado.

Fast forward to this past week and we're uber sensitive, testy, and unforgiving of each other. Like a gift from the gods, both of our boys become occupied for an entire afternoon and overnight, leaving us with like 18 hours to spend together. And I have to admit it would have been pretty easy to allow ourselves to become absorbed and distracted into having some solo time together. Kind of like toddlers doing parallel play. But we didn't. It would also have been easy to spend the whole 18 hours fighting. We managed to call truce after about 40 minutes.
We've found out over the years that "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" is not our motto. Although it feels like the last fucking thing I want to do sometimes, we do better the longer we're together.

I was not raised to get married. I was not raised to put any faith or any stock in it, to understand its purpose whatsoever. For me to get married in such a conventional way was the most radical thing I could have done. I was not raised to have any concept of the long haul, but to assume that pretty much everyone eventually lets you down or is a let down. That happiness is not found in permanence, but in newness. Ironically, I was also raised to believe that there's an It, a The One and when i got engaged my mom, her response was, "Well, he's clearly not the love of your life." and you know, there's a little truth in that. When we met and fell in love, it was real but lacked the passion and the intensity of several relationships I'd had in the past. Happily, it also lacked the gunplay, the alcoholism, and the girlfriend that was there before me that never quite got left for me.
Finding the love of my life took more than a few months or years. It's taken a decade and a half of the roller coaster of life, joys and triumphs, sorrows and failures for me to find it and I undoubtedly feel like that is what I have. And what I hope to continue to have for a long, long time.

Looking at our wedding photos the other day, because in true form, ahem, they're still not in photo albums. I was struck by how many people had not endured, or are enduring in sad compromises. We're old enough now that friends are splitting up and it's no longer the end of a starter marriage entered into in one's 20s, it's a bigger breakup, often with property division, kids to manage custody over, stuff that feels mind blowing to me.