​I GOT LUCKY

Q: How can you be married to the same person for forty years? A: But I haven’t been. ​

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Q: How can you be married to the same person for forty years? A: But I haven’t been.    Paolo Cuelho
 
My wife is a very private person, which creates something of a challenge for this column. I hope I don’t betray her trust.
 
It is not quite fifty years since we met. The week I send this out we will celebrate our 47th anniversary. That is all but a tiny fraction of our adult lives, Occasionally, one or the other of us has been traveling for a week or two, but other than that, it is an unusual month when we are not together virtually every day. You would think she would be sick of me by now.
 
I never grow tired of being in her presence. She is simply so interesting, perhaps because she is so interested in just about everything, except maybe my taste for old sitcoms. But when I stumbled across this q-and-a from Brazilian literary giant Paolo Coelho, it made clear exactly what has made our life the adventure it is.
 
We often remind each other how fortunate we are to be married still. It’s not because we haven’t worked at it as much as we have loved at it. Rather, we got married when we were pretty young. Neither of us had finished growing up to the point where we could say with anything other than a loving guess that we knew what we were doing.
 
For many of our early years together, she mostly put my interests and aspirations ahead of her own. I’d like to think I consulted her (I certainly said the words), but the fact is she never put the brakes on anything I suggested for us. She did not set her aspirations completely aside – she managed to complete an MBA while she was pregnant and a new mom, including driving across the entire State of Connecticut twice a week – with a sprained ankle in a boot – to take the classes she needed. She ran a successful business from our house, and though she made the decision to be at home with our eventual three kids, she also managed to build, from scratch, a highly successful career as a freelance communications expert. While many of her friends were trying to write the great American novel or chase the popular magazine bylines, she immersed herself in the field she studied and, to this day, is both fully employed and the captain of her own work ship. I know better than to write about her clients, but our favorite game when we are driving is to see trucks and billboards and hear her say, “They paid me.”
 
Since I retired, I admit to falling back on my original practice of suggesting the direction of our life together. I love being retired, to be honest. It has to do a lot with how naturally lazy I am and even more to do with a romantic memory of the first days of summer vacation when I was a kid. And without the consideration of being responsible to set an example for members of a synagogue or supporters of an organization, it has dawned on me how directive I must have been for most of those fifty years we have been together. Mostly, I spoke. Rarely, I asked.
 
Not so long ago, I proposed the notion that it was time for her to retire, as I did, because it was so much fun, and it would be more fun together. Maybe – just maybe – I said it lot. Finally, without rancor, she asked me to stop pitching retirement. She loves what she does. It still immerses her in interesting things (like mining in Africa and mass transportation in South America) and draws on her natural and acquired insights. Employers compete for her time. Really important people (I am not making that up) rely on her skill to craft their messages.
 
And, God, she loves me so much. I am constantly astonished, as I learn more and more about my less-than-perfect self, just how much she loves me.
 
I wish this for everyone. Here’s the lesson that can make it happen: that person you decided to build a life with yesterday is not the same person today. They’re better. And with any luck, because of them, so are you.