The Long Love

 I’ve talked a little bit here and there about our fall trip to Vienna, Austria, but as of last Tuesday, the trip is real: we bought our airline tickets! The airplane takes off in four months, but I’m already floating on air.

 It seems incredible that we will live in Vienna for four weeks; perhaps what I should really be amazed by is that Michael and I will celebrate 50 years of marriage this year. Most people will agree that marriage isn’t easy. Even when the love is true and deep, the realities of daily life can be erosive.

Bad things happen to people, and when you share a life with another person, there are more opportunities for bad things to happen. Add in a couple of children and the bad-things-happen index seems to rise exponentially. Some of the bad things are manageable—job loss, broken limbs, non-fatal car accidents—but we’ve had some bad luck that practically sucked the marrow out of our bones.

 I’d have to say my illness, which was finally diagnosed as lupus in 1989, was the gigantic bad thing for us. It forced me out of my career in telecommunications, which I happened to love, and which also provided our family’s insurance and lifestyle support. Michael had to take on complete responsibility for supporting us, which would have been enough of a burden in a society where you need two working people to get ahead. But because I was often incapacitated, he also had to run the household, manage the children, and take care of me.

 Wow. Sometimes it surprises me that he didn’t bolt. We both had had short, bad first marriages and neither of us wanted a repeat divorce. When we married, we made this vow: Homicide, suicide, or natural causes, the only way out is a pine box. Later we added: If you leave, you have to take the children.

 Do I think our vow is what made Michael hang in there when times were so difficult for us that we had to downsize our house and tighten our belts considerably? Probably not. I think he just loved me that much. (But when I browbeat him into adopting a toddler with me a few years later, the vow definitely was in play.)

 All the children survived and thrived, each in their own way. A decade or so ago, Michael had cancer—two different times, two different kinds—and I took care of him. It balances out if you hang in long enough. I’ve read recently about the phenomenon of gray divorce: old people leaving long marriages. I hear that Covid caused a lot of the trouble because couples, forced to spend so much time together, found out how unhappy they were.

 We are blessed in that regard. We enjoy many of the same things, like ballet and theater and art, and we find the same things funny. We like to spend time together, but we’re not joined at the hip. We support each other’s interests and hobbies. Maybe it’s not so surprising that our marriage is in its 50^th year.

 Early in our dating relationship, a strange thing happened. Michael was riding in the car with me, cracking jokes and fiddling with my radio station—major no-no, people—and I blurted out a sentence that I couldn’t explain then and I can’t explain now. I said, “I can’t believe I married such a turkey.”

 Boy, was that a conversation stopper. I had known him less than a month. I couldn’t believe I said it and, as he reported when we finally discussed it years later, he couldn’t either. Neither one of us acknowledged what I said. I gripped the steering wheel and drove. He made a comment along the lines of “How about them Cardinals?” (We lived in St. Louis back then.) The tension faded, but, thankfully, the relationship did not.

 Sometimes we say that we’ve been together over the centuries, sharing past lives. We are so simpatico that it feels like we’ve put in a lot of time learning how to balance in a marriage. Metaphysical, I know, but why not? I’m happy to think that we’ll find each other again in some distant time and place. Maybe we’ll get another 50 years out of it!

 Who’s in your life that you would like to be reincarnated with?