Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

How did you decide to get married?

I have always wanted to be married. My parents had a very strong partnership and I’ve always wanted that in my life. I was generally goal oriented in my personal life, always viewing relationships as potential lifelong commitments--in some ways that was not the best attitude to take, but it did make a good filter that mostly kept me from getting stuck in relationships that weren’t headed in that direction.

At twenty-seven I was starting to feel that time was running out. It’s funny to look back now, when twenty-seven seems so young, but at the time it felt that I had been dating for so long without finding the right match that perhaps the search was doomed to failure. I had started thinking seriously about becoming a single parent. And then I met Jason.

From the start my relationship with Jason felt comfortable and easy. We had so much in common, so many shared tastes and dreams, with just enough difference to keep things from being boring. He was smart and beautiful, funny and talented. We could talk for hours and laughed over so many shared references that we had to be careful not to shut other people out of our conversation. I was always happy to be spending time with him and being with him made me a nicer person. When we had been together only a few months, people assumed we’d been a couple for years. We certainly had our differences, but being together felt deeply right.

A couple of months after we started dating, we got into a conversation with a friend of Jason who said of the woman he was dating that she wasn’t someone he would marry. I asked if she knew that and he said no, that it would just hurt her, and I pointed out that he was treating her with a severe lack of respect. Afterward I told Jason that although we had only been together a brief time, I saw ours as a marriage track relationship--not that I was planning to marry him, but that I was assuming that if things continued to go well for a year or so, then we would probably be talking about it at that point--and that if he felt otherwise, or came to the conclusion that he could not see himself marrying me, then I expected him to let me know that.

Furthermore, I told him that if he were not ready to discuss marriage within two years, then I would probably move on. I liked him and we were good together and I was willing to do this just for the fun of it, but I had places to be. I think he was a little overwhelmed by that in the moment, but took it all in and agreed that was fair.

A month or so later, he started talking from time to time about “when we live together” and after a few instances of this, I stopped him and explained that I was not interested in living with him until we were engaged. That was not for any moral scruple, but a very practical concern. I had gone through the experience of ending relationships also disrupting my living situation and decided to avoid that if I could. While an engagement can certainly be broken, it at least requires a more serious commitment than simply signing a lease together because it’s more economical. Jason said he understood and stopped mentioning it for about six months. When he brought it up again I reminded him how I felt and he smiled and said “I remember.”

From that point on, we basically acted engaged. On my 30th birthday, when we had been together for a little over a year, we were having a deep conversation over dinner about values and plans, when I stopped him and said that we seemed to be talking like people who were planning to be married and that I was starting to trust in that. I needed to know that we were on the same page, that I wasn’t being played for a fool. He assured me that he was right there with me and saw us being married as the next step.

So I started looking at wedding venues and over the next several months we often spent weekend days visiting hotels, gardens, museums and wineries. But we still weren’t officially engaged. I kept waiting, but nothing seemed to happen. Finally I set a deadline of a planned trip to visit his parents--I wanted a ring on my finger and for him to tell them that we were planning to be married. Rather than buy a ring and present me with it, Jason felt that we should shop for the ring together. This led us as close to breaking up as we have ever come.

Jason and I have very different shopping styles. I might have gone to as many as three stores, tried on half a dozen rings, and picked the one that I liked best. Jason, however, wants to be sure that he has found the right choice, and the only way for him to be sure of that is to examine every possible option. So he dragged me to nine different shops and had me try on what seemed like hundreds of rings. I tried on rings until my fingers were sore and I was tired and hungry and didn’t even want to marry him any more if I had to try on one more ring. Fortunately, we gave up for that day.

The next day we went to a little boutique a few blocks from my apartment--I still hadn’t let him move in--and bought a simple sapphire ring with diamonds on either side. It was ready a week later, but Jason wasn’t available to pick it up that day, so I collected it from the jeweler, gave it to him on our way out to dinner that evening and he put it on my finger at the table. And the next day we flew up to Seattle and told his folks.

It was all terribly anticlimactic. I didn’t even realize at the time how disappointed I was. I could have proposed to him, but all along I was the one setting the pace and focusing on marriage. It was important to me that he do the asking, if only so he couldn’t say later that it was all my idea. For years, whenever friends would get engaged with a romantic surprise, I would have trouble not letting my grief overwhelm my joy for them, and I cried over many YouTube videos of over-the-top proposals, even though I would have been entirely happy with something much more modest. It took more than a decade for him to understand how painful it was for me not to have a good proposal story, and to apologize. It’s still a sadness for me, but now that it no longer feels like a conflict between us, it has been easier to let go.

The important thing is that we did decide to marry. We found a beautiful location at Paradise Ridge Winery in Santa Rosa, California and Jason was a real partner in all the wedding plans. September 16, 2000 was a beautiful day in every way and the twenty years since then have been better than I could ever have imagined.

What are the top 5 things that you and your spouse have in common?

Jason and I have a lot in common. When we were first dating it was sometimes spooky the tastes that we shared, the books and music and movies we loved—even the song that our mother’s sang to get us out of bed in the mornings. We connected on so many levels that by the time we’d been together a few months other people thought we’d been together for years.

Over time we’ve shared so many experiences and our connection has deepened, day by day and year by year, for more than twenty years. We often say that our relationship feels like forever and yet somehow still new and exciting.

There are a lot of shared values and tastes that I could list, but in limiting myself to five, here are the ones that stand out to me today:

5. We both love travel and new experiences and love to share what we experience with each other.

4. We believe in compassion for other people, in gratitude, and in giving back.

3. We both love theatre—seeing it, making it, talking about it, supporting it.

2. We are both willing to work at having better communication, a stronger relationship, and being better partners to each other, even when that effort is painful.

1. We’re both good at being happy and know that it’s not a destination, but a way of life.

I am grateful every day to be married to him!

There's a nice summary of recent research at Psychology Today this morning.

So, apparently another elitist upper-middle-class thing that we do is get married, according to this Washington Post article.

This stand-out statistic caught my eye:

...about a third of first births among white women coming before marriage, compared with three-quarters among black women.

Over in his journal, infinitehotel asked his readers to tell him about love, in honor of Valentine's Day. This has been kicking around in my head for a while, so I typed it out and liked the result enough to post it behind the cut. I'd also be interested in reading your thoughts on love, if you'd care to comment.

( Swimming Lessons )

I'm married to a Vulcan. This has advantages, but sometimes it can be a little awkward.

( ... )

I just arrived home to find Jason stark naked except for a headlamp and dustmask.

Because a couple of people have made comments about our wedding ceremony, I thought I'd go ahead and post the link: http://apocalypse.org/pub/u/hunter/ceremony.htm.

Jason and I wrote the whole thing together, drawing from a wide variety of sources to create something that we could both be completely comfortable with, word for word.

Four years ago today, on the third anniversary of our first date, Jason and I stood in front of a crowd of many of the people we love, members of our families and communities, and made some important promises to each other. We promised each other...

...to be your playmate, lover, partner and friend
your greatest ally, your biggest fan and your toughest critic.
I vow to laugh with you in joy,
To be your comfort in sorrow and to turn to you in my need,
To share my life with you, openly and truthfully,
And to grow with you in love.
I take you, with all your strengths and faults,
and I pledge to honor you and tenderly care for you through all our days.

Looking back over these first wonderful years of our marriage, it seems that we're doing a pretty good job, so far. My mom says it gets even better after the first fifty years--it's hard to imagine that much joy, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

We're having a very lovely day. I realized this morning that, for a change, we had no plans today. So I checked the tide schedule and saw that low tide would be at 11:51 am. I alerted Jason and we hopped in the MINI and scooted up to Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester. Wingaersheek has a sandbar stretching almost half a mile out into the sea, so at low tide you can walk right out. It's surreal to look out at what would seem to be open water and see people standing with the water around their ankles. Then you arrive out at the point of the bar, where the waves from both sides are meshing together, and you turn to look back at the beach, so far away.

We let the incoming tide chase us back onto dry land and made our way down into Gloucester. We had a nice lunch and picked up some live lobsters, which are currently resting in the rotter after a hot ride home. Some fresh corn gathered at a roadside stand and we're all set for dinner.

We got home, feeling sunbaked and lethargic, so we took a nap and now we're brimming with energy for the lifestyle maintenance tasks we've been putting off all week.

It's a good life.