Approaching another anniversary...

2 November 1969

Was there ever a time that I wasn't with Ralph?  It  seems like all my memories, all my life events, all the growing and developing I've done, I've done  in the company of this one infuriatingly wonderful man.  Our 41st (!!!!!) wedding anniversary is approaching and I can hardly believe this is possible.  Ten days from now on 2 November we will  pass another year together.  Is it just habit? 

I absolutely believe that it is still a decision beyond choice. I have to be with this crazy man.  I love him and my existence is tied up with his in a way that I find impossible to explain. I've tried.  Over the many years we've been together I've wondered if I have  marriage answers for anyone else and I come up with only one guaranteed answer.  If you want to stay together in a vibrant, mad relationship you have to be me and you have to hook up with Ralph.  In other words, it works for us and I do not in any way presume to dish out cliches and platitudes about how to keep other relationships alive. 

For years I've been of the view that it is impossible to give relationship advice to others because one never knows what goes on behind closed doors with couples.  What may look completely dysfunctional to my eyes, seems to work for others.  The happiest and most idyllic of couples turn out to nearly kill each other in private.  Who am I to say what works for others?  I can hardly work out why this marriage works for me, except that I love this madman I am married to.  I'm sure that helps.

I was thinking this morning about the year in which we got married.  Ralph arrived in the States just a few weeks before we announced our engagement and a few weeks after that we got married.  Very quick and very certain in only the way that 20 year olds can be.

The first US Apollo moon landing had just happened, Woodstock was in full swing and the hippy generation ruled.  The Beatles made their last live appearance on the roof of the Apple Studio in London and then John Lennon and Yoko recorded 'Give Peace a Chance'.  These things were happening with a constant menacing background of the growing war in Vietnam.  Richard Nixon became the US president and totally screwed up my entire generation by introducing a compulsary draft into the armed forces and escalating the war.  There were  huge anti-war demonstrations in Washington and the UK, in an enlightened moment, scrapped the death penalty.  It was an exciting time in which to be young and in love.  The world felt electric to me, but that may have been because I saw it all through a haze of pure love.

As it turned out the draft, the war and the situation in America spurred us on to moving to the UK in 1970, but 1969 was fantastic.  Young, in love and in New York City, it felt like the city was presented to us as a giant wedding present there for the taking and we took.  We went to the theatre, restaurants, museums, mini-holidays, threw parties and had the proverbial honeymoon year of newly-wedded bliss.

Looking back I can see how innocent we were.  The idea of future never entered our thinking.  The idea that anything bad could ever happen to us was not even a glimmer.  Maybe that was one of the keys for us.  We were so wrapped up in each other, so unconcerned about having things, that it didn't matter that our furniture came from dumped rubbish or that our clothes were secondhand. We hadeach other and that was so strong and so solid that it still carries us along today.

During the course of the last 41 years we have been able to afford new clothes, designer labels and our own home.  We seem to have come full circle.  We buy secondhand clothes again and often pick up bits and pieces at flea markets and secondhand shops.  The difference now is that we are more aware of the unknown future since sometimes we seem to live there.  Words like savings and pensions have entered our vocabulary.

We are no longer 21 and lookiing through rose-coloured glasses.  We are both in our 60's and looking through bifocal lenses.  This gives me a very different perspective on life.  I now imagine a future with Ralph when we don't work and we can spend longer days together.  A future when we have time to look at each other and see through our myopic eyes that the person in front of us is still crazy, still exciting and still wonderful.  I am so lucky.  I met the right man at exactly the right time in the right place.  Of course I was too young, I was still a student and he lived across an ocean from me, but it could not have been more perfect.

So is there a secret?  Is there an answer for a great  marriage?  Maybe  perseverance is part of it.  Also, when things get tough and they will and continue to do so, to remember that the person in the mirror is the only one in this relationship that can be fixed. Maybe it's really important to remember that he is not me.  He is not clairvoyant and he is not able to read all my many moods, even after 41 years.  We keep talking.  For me, that means more than the surface chatter that I am so good at, it means genuine communication and sometimes that gets tough. It also means looking without my glasses in order to see the real  person I am with, the handsome, alive, beautiful person I have been intelligent enough to grow up with. 

I am comforted by the knowledge that as I age and my short term memory fails, I will still have so many spectacular long-term memories of being with Ralph. How great is that!