Living to tell about it - married 20 years

My husband and I celebrated 20 years of wedded bliss this week. OK, "bliss" might be a bit of an exaggeration. "Celebration", though, that is right on the money.

It's difficult for me to put into words what this relationship means to me. I must admit, our longevity has more to do with Dan's quiet and stubborn love than with my own. He has the ability to hold on loosely that allows me to grow and love him more.

He arranged for us to spend some time away from kids, cell phones, lap tops this week, a gesture that both thrilled and shocked me. Funny thing about these quiet guys, they think a lot about doing things but it takes a lot for them to sometimes do them. I don't say this as a complaint or a criticism, for I live the opposite -- thinking too little and doing too much.

So when he told me to pack a bag for the night, I gasped. Did he mean a lunch? Did he mean for me to take the trash out? I was a little slow on the uptake, so he elaborated (OK, that's an exaggeration, too)...he "said", "we're going to a bed and breakfast for the night. " And it was smack dab in the middle of the week - Wednesday!

Because it is January and because we were in the middle of the week, we had the whole place to ourselves - there was not another person in the Inn. It was, (and this is no exaggertion) the absolute best time of our marriage. Quiet, no pressures, nothing we had to "do" or "go to" . He'd even arranged for the kids to spend some time with his dad.

Since we were the only ones at the Inn, we chatted with the waitress at our dinner and she asked us a lot of questions about being married 20 years. It was like we were some kind of freak couple, something almost celebrity-like to her. One of her questions stopped me cold, "what do you think is the thing you would miss most if he wasn't there?"

When you are young and you think about "love and marriage", there are all those childlike things that you think this type of relationship will bring you. Things like having romance in your life, someone to always talk to, someone to "do" stuff with -- that's what I think most of us think about when we think about a long term relationship. I also think that we believe -- or I did - -that marriage is the ultimate commitment.

Well, it isn't. Parenting is.

And marriage is far less about romance, I think, than about revelations. Revelations about yourself, the person you married and the world around you. But heavy on the revelations about yourself.

So that's how I answered her (to her grave disappointment, I think). I said, "I would miss learning more about myself."

She looked at me like I was the most unromantic person she had ever met. She even looked at Dan at bit helplessly, as if she felt sorry for him. Maybe she did.

But I meant it as the ultimate compliment. I think a real marriage teaches the other person about themselves in ways that cannot be learned any other way. I think marriage is where your world meshes with another world and forces changes that are unimagineable before.

So I made a list of things that I've learned about myself over the past 20 years with Dan's help. And I will share it with him sometime. Probably not in the middle of the NCAA tournament (I've definately learned about sacred time!) or during the middle of the fourth quarter of the SuperBowl. I will share it with him sometime when we are not shuttling kids to a myriad of events or planning the menu/meals for the upcoming week. I will share it with him when we are not busy putting our spring garden together or putting the garden away for fall. I will share it with him when we're not trying to figure out who gets the car when Nathan leaves for college or when we're trying to replace the dryer (or dishwasher or refrigerator).

All these things -- though less than thrilling -- are the components of our life together, not really our life. These are the things that are the framework but not really the structure. These are the things that fill up our time but are not enduring.

I can say this one thing with all surety, Dan is the closest thing to God's grace that I've ever seen, known or felt on earth. He embodies a kindness that reveals more to me on any given day than 1,000 sermons or scriptures. His constant walk with me these past 20 years has not only given new lives, it has more than saved my own.

I hope that I can figure out how to say this better, in case I'm ever asked again.