More and more these days I’m feeling like the odd one out, as far as society is concerned. And you know what? I don’t care a bit.
The reason for feeling so out of sync with much of the rest the world is because I have been happily married for a long time. In this day and age it seems to be the anomaly rather than the nor,
Recently Janet, the editor of Footprints magazine, and her husband celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary. She was amazed at the response from people who carried on as thought it was a major achievement and something really usual they had achieved. Sadly these days it is.
For those like Mick and I who have been married more than double that amount of years, it’s little wonder we are made to feel like dinosaurs. That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with being dinosaurs.
Someone coming on for thirty years married recently commented that they felt like they had been married forever. I have to say I don’t. The exterior looks vastly different, but inside I still feel much the same as I did all those years ago. The difference is that over the years we have grown up, we’ve accepted responsibility, we learned to compromise with the aim of pleasing the other person, we’ve gone through good and tough times and learned to be thankful for every day we have together. And we still love each other and can’t imagine being with anyone else.
On the home blog I wrote how sometimes the simple things work best. Here, I’m talking about simple things like commitment, permanence in marriage, love, patience, respect, thinking about how to please the other person, perseverance, just to name a few – all the qualities that once used to be accepted as part of marriage. They’re the things we need to get back to. They’re the things we need to incorporate into marriage, if they re not already there.
Just maybe if we started to display those characteristics in our marriages, and rejoice in our marriages, others would see that marriage is worth the time and effort invested. Society really needs to see people who rejoice in their marriage. Maybe then our next generation would want to get back to basics instead of concentrating on unimportant things.
Join me tomorrow for another view of marriage.
What Would You Give Up For Your Spouse?