My wife, Priscilla, and I celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary yesterday.
45 years. (Here it comes…) “Feels like it was just yesterday.”
I thought of writing about our journey through these years and how blessed I am and “I don’t know what she ever saw in me!”, but then I was reminded of a video I saw recently.
We’re at that stage where younger couples are asking what our secret is and what’s the key to a happy marriage. And while I do have a few thoughts on that, this story is really the key to all of it I think.
I was scrolling on TikTok one day … Priscilla loves to pick on me for being on TikTok. She says I’m living my best teenage girl life.
Anyway…
I came across this video that I saved. It’s from Dr. Milton Louis Gonzalez who is a psychologist, therapist, podcaster and a TEDx presenter. Researching the origin of this story the internet says “author unknown” so maybe it’s completely made up but just listen to the message.
It begins with Dr. Gonzalez who says he was sitting across from an older gentleman who he heard had been married for 60 years. And so he approached him and said, “So tell me, what’s the secret to staying married to the same person for 60 years?”
He looked at the man, smiled and said, “Young man, you don’t stay married to the same person for 60 years. You see, the woman I married at 22, she’s gone. She became a mother. Life wounded her. Joy softened her. Loss deepened her. Every season introduced me to a woman that I had never met before. And the young man she married? He disappeared too. Fatherhood changed me. Failure changed me. Success changed me. Grief changed me. But ultimately, God changed me.”
The young man sat there and thought about all of this and then asked, “So what’s the secret? How do you stay married when both people keep changing?”
The older man leaned in and said, “You see, most people think marriage is about finding the right person. It isn’t. Marriage is learning to fall in love with the same soul through a thousand different versions of that person. We weren’t married for 60 years because loving was easy, we were married for 60 years because we never stopped getting to know each other. The day that you think you already know your spouse, that’s the day that you stop pursuing them. Marriage doesn’t survive because two people stay the same, marriage survives because they keep discovering who the other is becoming.”
The older man walked away and the younger man realized something powerful and profound: “The strongest marriages aren’t built by people who found the perfect person, they’re built by people who never stopped being students of the person that they promised to love. Because love isn’t the reward for knowing someone completely, love is having the humility to admit that there is still more of you for me to discover.”
Wow! When I first saw that I had to save it because I knew I would eventually use that.
And here we are.
Priscilla and I got married young. I was 20 and she was just 18. Are we the same people we were then? Absolutely not. All of those things mentioned in the story, and many more, have caused us to evolve into the people we are now. Just like everyone else there were hopes and dreams. Some came to be, others did not. There’s been happiness, sadness, grief, loss, success and failure. We were ecstatic when babies were born and devastated when loved ones passed.
Through it all there has been love, understanding and respect.
We both often tell people, “I married my best friend.” And we did. And it’s exciting to discover who we are becoming.
Never stop falling in love with that person, or soul, that you met.
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