On Marriage

You know you’ve been married a long time when you know everything about how your wife thinks and she you. That is not to say there are not surprises, since we always will be growing emotionally and intellectually, but the other person knows the principles governing your life, and what you will probably do under certain circumstances .

There is comfort in this fact, being it is a foundation on which to move on from, to deepen the relationship. You can empathize with someone you can understand, but not necessarily always agree with.

Let me tell you my audiobook story. I set the speed up to 1.5 and a little above on the audiobook I was listening to because I felt the author was going too slow, but later realized it is just because I am married to my wife. My wife moves at hyper-speed. Now this was a problem early in the marriage because I go a little slower, but have learned to appreciate and admire the speed at which her mind works. I learned there is no sense to play chess with her. She is always ten moves ahead while I am struggling with two or three moves at the most.

Everything seems to be important to her, which irks me to no end, because I believe somethings are just not as important compared to other things. She enjoys to some extent stressful events and situations coming her way and seems to obtain joy from them. She can endure stress for long periods of time where I would just buckle.

When her mind gets going too fast for me to keep up with, I gently try to reflect back to her the absurdity of the speed at which she is going at, which produces a hearty laugh. I love that also about her: the ability to laugh at herself.

I have learned to love every mannerism, every thought she shares, her strengths and her weaknesses. I once knew two identical twins who had lived together so many years that one would start a sentence and the other finish it. They didn’t always agree with each other, but they knew each other enough they could even finish the others thought. I understand how this is possible now.

It has been a hard marriage being we are quite different from each other, and the arguments of our earlier years were ferocious and quite disheartening. It took many years for both of us to overlook things that irked us about each other, and see the true beauty of the other, but it has been worth it.