After celebrating my twenty-third wedding anniversary this past January, this great line from Sonali Dev’s hilarious and heartfelt novel, The Vibrant Years, painted a huge smile of understanding on my face. Moving parts—a complicated situation with a lot of variables and components that would take too long to explain in detail. Yup, that’s marriage. So, what’s the secret to navigating those moving parts and staying married?

If you asked ten married couples, you’d probably get ten different answers. After the wedding ceremony and the hoopla, the only thing I’ve learned to count on is that everything will change, change, and change again. And, I hadn’t prepared for that.

He Said, She Said

In my twenties, I’d eagerly studied John Gray’s book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, (1992). I’d obsessively watched the Kevin Bacon/Elizabeth Perkins charming romantic comedy movie He Said, She Said (1991). He says sex, she says romance. He says relationship, she says marriage. I knew men and women saw the world differently. But I didn’t think those differences would announce themselves so soon and so loudly after signing my marriage certificate.

When I asked my husband if he remembered our first big fight after we got married, he said it was probably him asking me to wash my hands before I started dinner and me yelling—don’t try to change me! That’s not too far-fetched. If my hands aren’t caked in mud, he’s right, I may not be washing them.

I, however, remember our first big fight as him complaining I bought too much of something at the warehouse-style store I loved shopping at. Maybe it was toilet paper, maybe it was tomato sauce, I don’t remember, but my husband was budget conscious, and I was not. I had a good job and my own bank account and didn’t like anyone telling me how to spend my money. Um, our money? The first big change I hadn’t prepared for—we spent our paychecks differently—him, planned and carefully—me, if it was a good price, I bought it.

Separate But Equal…Pet Peeves

Okay, so there’s also the hygiene thing. Recently, my daughter and I were in my parent’s apartment while they were away for the weekend, and the dirty dishes they left in the sink shocked me. As I loaded the dishwasher, she asked me, “is that a ‘you’ thing, or a ‘Dad’ thing?” Valid question. He’s the clean freak in the family. I never left dishes in the sink before we met, but now I wash things before putting them in the dishwasher because he worries about food remnants attracting bugs. He, in turn, loads the silverware into the dishwasher’s separate compartments, the way I like it, forks with forks, spoons with spoons.

Is the secret to marriage accepting your partner’s idiosyncrasies? Maybe. We’ve both changed over the years. Now, he buys way too many items in bulk that I don’t think we need. I wash my hands more often than I used to. I still touch public door handles more than he’d like.

Make ‘Em Laugh

When I asked my husband what he thought the secret of our marriage was, he said “you cook, I clean, and we sleep in separate bedrooms.” We got a sleep divorce years ago—he can’t fall asleep without the television on. I want dark and quiet to read on my kindle.

For me, the secret is laughter. No matter how mad I am, he’s always silly enough to make me laugh. Plus, we’re still attracted to each other—the minute I take off my clothes, my husband applauds. Seriously, sometimes I even get a loud “yeah,” as well. His generous smile is just as attractive to me now as it was when he first knocked at my door for what I thought would be another bad blind date. But what’s really held us together all these years?

Last week I overheard a women tell the office manager in our building that her husband was out of town. When asked how long he would be away, she said, “not long enough,” and we all laughed. I couldn’t resist asking how many years they’d been married and what their secret was. “Fifty-seven years,” she said, “and we married so young, I was twenty, we expected to grow and change together.”

Do Your Own Thing

That made sense, but when we married, me at thirty-two and he three weeks shy of turning thirty, I thought we were done growing and changing. I knew we would have disagreements; we were different. But after living together for two years, we knew each other well and were committed to building a life together despite our respective flaws. Until we had children and career changes and health challenges, and sometimes didn’t recognize our reflections in the mirror. How do marriages survive all that?

As I thought of that woman who giggled with glee that her husband hadn’t returned yet from wherever he was, I thought maybe we survived because not only do we enjoy time apart, but we support each other’s choices. A prime example—although my husband is extremely private, (he’s not even on any social media) and is not thrilled that I write about our marriage, he loves me enough not to ask me to stop.   

Respecting each other’s space—separate vacations, separate hobbies, yes even separate bedrooms—for us, it’s that simple.  We have grown together, as a couple, as parents, and as friends, but we never forgot the importance of growing on our own and giving each other the space to do so. That’s our secret. What’s yours?

Thanks, Sonali Dev, this is one great line.

If you’d like to read more about The Vibrant Years, click here.

If you’d like to read about me, and why I started this blog, click here.