A Journey Through an Amazingly Large Number of Seconds

Forty-five years – 540 months, 2,346 weeks, 16,425 days, 394,200 hours, 23,652,000 minutes, and an amazingly large number of seconds – that’s how long I have been married to my hubby, Tim.  We celebrated this momentous occasion recently, and it has left me both curious and awestruck as to how two humans can encounter, and be challenged by, so many of life’s moments and continue to walk the path of enduring love.   

For Tim and me, our journey started as high school sweethearts (conjure up pictures of proms, polyester tuxes, Gunne Sax dresses, and dancing to “Color My World”) in the late 70’s.   We were madly in love – a state I now understand can leave two humans making spontaneous, and sometimes irrationally crazy, decisions about the rest of their lives.  For us, that meant planning a wedding when we were only eighteen and twenty. 

We spent the next three years buying our first home and welcoming two children into the world.   Arguably, this is a time when many folks are in the slow process of maturing into full adulthood.  We, on the other hand, had jumped aboard the fast track and were zipping through the ‘80s and ‘90s focused on surviving financially, raising our kids, and pretending we had our proverbial shit together. And mostly we did.

I use the word ‘pretending’ not because we were consciously trying to deceive ourselves or anyone else.  I use it because, in many ways, we weren’t prepared for how to navigate this adult life we had entered so young, so we just kept on walking – sometimes running – through these years of creating a family and a life.   We were a duo that operated as one – never really stopping to check in on ourselves and assess how we were each doing individually.

Life, however, has this uncanny way of sometimes inviting us to stop and take inventory.  For Tim and me, this came in the way of some dark times of depression and overwhelming anxiety twenty odd years into our union - leading each of us into a time of individual exploration and growth.  And this is when things got tricky - how do two people endure individuation when they have shared a united path with little thought to being two separate selves?  All I can say now is that they do it with tremendous struggle, with lots of tears, and with a fearful willingness to sit in uncertainty about the future. And so, we sat. 

In our sitting, we discovered entirely new facets of ourselves, both individually and together.  We learned to hold the investment we had made in each other for two decades; we realized that no love is perfect; we began to understand that long term connection is about balancing the focus of self and partnership, and we developed some skills in the realm of accepting not only the things we gain in a lasting relationship, but also the things we sacrifice.

I realize that everyone’s journey in partnership is unique, and I am only reflecting on what has influenced ours over forty–five years.  It’s been hard, and it’s been easy; it’s been everything in between.  It’s been a rollercoaster, and it’s been a quiet meandering down a long, lazy river.

Happy anniversary to us