20 Years Later

Today my husband and I celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. Twenty years!? How in the world can that be?  It feels like just yesterday. And it also feels like an eternity ago.

We were so young.  One of us out of college, one still in.  We were living in different states, and all we knew was that any moment more that we had to be apart was way too many.  Poor and young, we decided it made financial sense to get married and pay one rent rather than living separately and paying two. Practicality over our financial situation outweighed the advice of all of those “wise people” telling us to wait.

And so it began.

We stood before God and a congregation full of people and made promises that neither of us truly understood. We exchanged vows that sounded nice but whose gravity it would take years to really absorb. We began a life together that I don’t believe either of us could have accurately imagined in our twenty two year old minds.

The reality of two very different worlds colliding was not always pretty. Arguments over mundane things- which way the toilet paper goes on the roll, how to properly pronounce and use words, how long to look in the check register for the lost $.05; there were plenty of things to disagree about.

But the feeling of a warm body to lie next to, the joy of coming home to someone so special, the electricity of shared laughter, the unnoticed opportunities to catch the other singing when they thought no one could hear; there was so much beauty.

In twenty years, we’ve done many things together. Lots of giant things- building a career, bringing kids into the world, watching a beloved mother (in-law) pass away, choosing to stay when we both wanted to walk, run, away. And we’ve done plenty of nothing together- endless hours snuggled up napping, binge watching series of favorite shows.

I don’t believe either of us knew back then that it would be like it is today. Something powerful happens when the butterflies of new love settle into the steady flow of more ordinary love that are replaced by the deep, choosing it every day in both the best and very very worst of it, love. When you don’t want to, but you do it anyway; that’s where the surprising love lives. And that love, that’s the love that you build twenty, thirty, forty years on. It’s the love that creates giant pockets of joy in the midst of hard times. That’s the best love of all.

In twenty years we’ve had valleys we never would have chosen. But the peaks, the peaks are far greater than any I could have dreamed. The view from twenty years is pretty extraordinary. I can’t wait to see what it looks like in twenty more.