This Wednesday is our 24th wedding anniversary.  And somewhere in that same time frame is the sixth anniversary of the invention of this blog.  I think it’s June 1st for the blog, but it might be a bit earlier.  For the first bloggal anniversary back in 2014, I wrote a blog post about Brenda and our wedding.  I’ve made it an annual tradition since then to write about wedding anniversary stuff and now if I don’t do it, it might be grounds for divorce, so…

I’m not complaining.  Some of the best stuff I’ve written is the anniversary stuff. I’m particularly partial to the 2017 post, wherein I describe how the success of our marriage may determine whether or not I get assassinated.  It’s a long story.  Read the post.

Originally, the plan for this post was to do an interview.  A couple of months ago, I was listening to a political podcast and the guy running the podcast decided to take a break from politics and interview his wife.  It was fascinating and I thought it would be fun to do something like that.  You know, talk about how we met, how we decided to get married, maybe have some conflicting stories, that kind of stuff.  I discussed it with my wife and she thought it was a great idea.  I started prepping to interview her.  Then I found out that she thought I meant that she could interview me.  I am uncertain why she thought that or why she thought that was a good idea.  After all, I’ve been writing a blog for six years now.  I have written at least six blog posts about our marriage and another ten or so that touched on our marriage, or some aspect of it.  Wouldn’t it be better just this once to get her perspective on things?  As it turns out, perhaps not.  My wife is something of a private person and she doesn’t want me prying around inside her head and I respect that.  Even after 24 years, we get our wires crossed.  Anyway, the idea is not dead yet.  As they say in tricky labor talks, negotiations are still ongoing.

Going back through the old posts has been more educational and edifying than I thought it would.  One of the points I made back in 2014 particularly grabbed me.  When we got married, I was surrounded by a lot of divorced people and I had it in my mind that marriage was hard.  I suppose it can be, but being married to Brenda has mostly been pretty easy.  We do miscommunicate, which is the hazard you get when one part of the happy married couple tests positive for adult ADD (yeah, that would be me).  We both seem to have the capacity to move on and we both have short memories.  The problem hasn’t been the marriage.  It’s been the life events outside of the marriage, which has graced us with a plethora of crapitude.  The crapitude isn’t dire.  Neither of us is facing down death, at least as far as we know.  But it has been real and challenging.

Or maybe our marriage is easy because of the crapitude.  If your choices in life are limited, or even if your choices in life are all about choosing the lesser evil, then there really isn’t much to fight about.  Then it’s just a matter of deciding whether or not we’re going to face those challenges together.  Benjamin Franklin was once quoted as saying, “We shall all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”  We’ve chosen to hang together and I’m grateful for that and I’m grateful for a spouse that doesn’t let the difficulties of being married to me (and those difficulties are many and diverse in nature) get to her.

So Happy Anniversary, B.  I’m trusting you to once again give me something to write about next year.