Sometimes, you just have to learn a few lessons before you’re ready for the love of your life.
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I’ve been married three times, but I have only fallen in love once, and that was over sixty years ago.
In high school, I was far too shy to let the girl know my feelings, but she forever occupied a place in my heart. I kept her there but when life caught up with me, that part of my heart remained closed.
I married my first wife, Fran, because she and I shared a love of literature. We spent a night with friends on a beach, awaiting a sports car race the next day. We stayed awake the whole night talking. By morning, we knew we would be together for what we thought would be the rest of our lives.
We were wrong.
As it turned out we weren’t really as compatible as we’d thought as a husband and wife. We were devoted friends, however, and ultimately we produced two wonderful children and a Ph.D… But even on our wedding day, I knew I’d made a mistake.
When we parted, I knew we would always remain in touch because we were friends, and also because we had committed ourselves to co-parenting our children — a commitment strong enough to survive a move from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Napa, California.
This covenant was a major reason why my second marriage was doomed to failure.
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If I made a mistake in marrying Fran (and I don’t really think it was a mistake), I truly blew it when I agreed to tie the knot with my second wife. I couldn’t stop laughing when a Marrying Sam in a storefront shop in Reno, Nevada (I can’t even call it a wedding chapel) did the dirty deed. It was comically ridiculous, but it seemed necessary because my Canadian girlfriend had neglected to get a visa when we moved to California. Imagine two Ph.D.’s forgetting such an important item!
Ours was a marriage of “convenience.” It lasted far longer than it should have mainly because I had two children to raise. The co-parenting part was easy. What wasn’t easy was the way my new wife related to my first wife and to me any time I talked with the mother of my children.
I was in a fight whenever I spoke to Fran about the kids. Wife number two was jealous of my closeness to wife number one. I also suspected that she resented my love for my children.
I was both faithful and loyal, a good friend and companion, and I cared about her in my own way, yet I was never in love with her. Like many others, I just did what I thought I was supposed to, trying to make the best of life. We parted amicably with the help of a marital therapist.
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I vowed that I would never again make the mistake of marrying someone I didn’t love.
To make sure of this, I found a tall house in the woods overlooking Lake Tahoe, where for nearly twenty-five years I devoted myself to skiing, fly fishing, hiking, and the company of a few friends, assiduously avoiding any further entanglement with a woman.
While I lived the life of a hermit, a thousand miles away in a small New Mexico town a white haired woman in her seventies suddenly took an interest in a Facebook page for a book I had recently published. For many years, she too committed herself to being single, after a series of her own marital disasters. Because she used an alias, I had no idea who she was when we began to correspond, but when she revealed her true identity I was floored. She was the girl I had fallen in love with in high school so many years before!
Within a few weeks, we were together. Within months, we were married. It had been over sixty years since we graduated and went our separate ways, yet here we were together so many years later.
How could something so wonderful come about?
Why did we each have to undergo so many difficulties to get here?
Each of us had reproached ourselves for the disastrous decisions we’d made in marrying the wrong people. Yet, as we talked to one another about it, we realized, from a perspective of nearly eight decades, that our marital boo-boos hadn’t really been “mistakes” at all.
Our less than wholly desirable liaisons had forced us to learn more about ourselves, something we’d doubtless have avoided under pleasanter circumstances. Rough edges needed smoothing. Arrogance needed the humbling experiences marriage so readily provides. What finally became clear to us is that we simply had to have something to occupy ourselves for those sixty years when we were apart!
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Thinking marriage will last forever, couples are plunged into distress and despair when a marriage ends, commonly blaming themselves or their partner in the belief that they’ve made a terrible mistake. In the short run, perhaps they’re right.
From the viewpoint of an entire life, what were originally seen as unforgiveable errors may be revealed as essential steps in a person’s development. Even when we fail to learn from our blunders, we are nonetheless changed by life experiences. We don’t see things quite the same way.
We are forever changed by marriage.
Some will say, for the worse. I can only speak for myself and for my beloved wife, Laura, when I say we believe that all of our “mistakes” were essential in changing us into the people we are today — into two individuals who are perfect for one another.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
The point of this article is that our judgments of ourselves and our decisions in life need to be tempered by the perspective of time. We can’t know the impact of our presumed “mistakes” until we are able to see them with greater clarity later on. That being the case, perhaps we need to be a bit more charitable toward ourselves and others.