Getting Our Anniversary All The Way To Happy

Today, my partner and I celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary (OK . . . I'll admit it: we were both late bloomers and re-treads). As usual, these annual celebrations present an opportunity to look back over the years, to see what worked well (and what worked not-so-well), to take stock of how far we've come, and, most of all to express gratitude to our Higher Power and to one another for our very many blessings. Making a life-long commitment in the midst of the midlife transition does offer a number of advantages over going through the transition while struggling to make a relationship work: at least we had the advantage of leaving most of the starry-eyed stuff in the hope chest of faded memories.

Those young couples who 'get it right' the first time are becoming an increasingly rare breed — almost miraculous, in fact. Based on the statistics, you'd think that the harbingers of doom out there are right when they so loudly proclaim that 'the family is in trouble.' They blame it on all sorts of pressures and distractions that afflict today's families and, I've got to admint that today's couples do, indeed have many more pressures to deal with than they did fifty or a hundred years ago. Yet, I don't believe that you can pin the blame for failed relationships on the pressures of family life alone. Much of it has to be laid at the feet of an increasingly ineffective midlife transition.

Once you've accepted the fact that you can define 'adulthood' as 'childhood without the parental constraints,' you begin to see the seeds of the problem right away: too many people go into marriages that are founded upon little more than hopes, feelings, and wishful thinking. Our cultural preoccupation with individuality and personal privacy does little to disrupt these TV sitcom-style belief systems. Who'll show you the difference between 'love' and 'romance'? Maybe you've seen those facts of life spread across a kitchen apron somewhere: "Kissin' Don't Last . . . Cookin' Do!"? (Remember that jokes are only funny because they're true.) The difference between love and romance hinges on the fact that love is a decision; romance is a feeling.

Feelings, particularly strong ones, fade over a relatively short time. Mass marketers rely strongly on that fact. If you see or hear a particularly annoying commercial over a long enough period of time, your annoyance will fade, but you'll remember the advertiser when you're thinking about their product or service. Romantic love and hate are not opposites: they're the same emotions only expressed in different directions. The opposite of romantic love is indifference. When romantic love fades (as it absolutely must), what's left behind should be the decision to commit to one another. Have you ever heard someone say, "I love him/her, but I'm not in love with him/her"? That's not necessarily a bad thing — in fact, it's a very important phase of relationship-building — but for many relationships, it spells the beginning of the end.

Since the untransformed adult (really the 'adult child') bases most of his or her decisions on what it feels like, when the Cinderella clock strikes twelve, the time comes to cut and run. There's another factor that I need to mention here, and that's the rather obvious but sad fact: that one person can't have a relationship. That implies that if your partner completely gives up on your relationship, there's nothing you can do all by yourself to save it. It's only if both of you have entered into the personal transformation that we call the midlife transition that your relationship can similarly transform from a decision based on feelings to feelings based on a decision.

For the sake of argument, let's shift the scenario from the love of one partner for another, to the love of a parent for his or her child. For the vast majority of people who are capable of experiencing parental love, they experience that love as unconditional. At some point between birth and the teenage years, these parents make a transition from the emotional high of new parenthood to the acceptance of parental responsibility as an expression of their love and commitment to their child. Even should it come down to a decision to throw the youngster out of the house, the pain the parent feels comes from his or her unconditional acceptance of the child. Anger, even hatred, arises from frustration and disappointment in both the child and themselves. Yet, generally, regardless of the circumstances, their commitment to their child remains, holding out life-long hope that the person on the other side of their parental bond will change his or her mind.

I'm not saying that, to have a truly mature relationship, a person has to carry a hopeless torch for a lost loved one. However, when both parties in that relationship decide to carry that torch for the other, regardless of how dimly it may be burning, each will learn a great deal about the other and, in the process, they'll come to learn even more about themselves. They'll come to appreciate a little bit more each day the gifts that they themselves have to offer their partners and, therefore their world. In the struggle to bear their relationship through the difficult transitions that they themselves are experiencing, they'll find that their love has deepened and transformed with it, to the point that, almost at will, they can summon the emotion — the passion — that they feel for one another. Every year, they can stop, think about how far they've come, and truly celebrate their choice to maintain their commitment 'for better or worse' and to be grateful to each other for summoning the courage to have held on to that commitment for one . . . more . . . year.