My husband and I just celebrated our eleven year wedding anniversary. I’m going to do the annoying thing now and inform you all that we’ve been together for seventeen years. That’s right, he waited five years to propose and I stuck around, despite later telling women never to do that. What can I say? I don’t think it normally works out, but it did for us. That said, you should never stick around for five years waiting for a ring.
While our marriage is hardly perfect (he would probably complain that I bother him with “too many concerns about rare diseases”) it’s pretty great. He is my best friend and the only person who will re-watch Fantastic Mr. Fox with me ten times a year. Having made it eleven years means we’ve successfully cleared a few hurdles, such as being long distance for multiple years, passing over the seven-year itch, a severe infertility diagnosis, being cooped up together at home for a full year when I was insane about COVID, and the birth of two children. Recently, we even survived our neighbors successfully extorting us for $2000. And let’s not forget the most insurmountable hurdle of our relationship: our problematic 2-year age gap.
As some of my haters would be keen to remind me, my husband may very well one day tired of my nonsense and divorce me (I can assure you with confidence the reverse will not happen.) But I guess if he were to divorce me, this article will be pretty embarrassing and I will probably restack it and say something like, “Wow, THIS didn’t age well! Anyway, I’m doing a 30% off sale on annual subscriptions!”
So anyway, I thought it might be nice for me to share what I’ve learned about marriage from the past eleven years, but also give my husband space to share his thoughts. So here’s our co-post on our marriage, starting with my own thoughts, since ladies come first, as they say. Enjoy.
Nick and I have been married for eleven years now, and I regularly ask myself how much of our marital success (thus far—I will not do any more hedging for the rest of the piece, just so you know) is down to luck or skill. Probably a bit of both, but I will focus on the skill part since I can’t very well write a full Substack article about getting lucky. He and I will mention lots of things that we’ve learned, but almost every component of marriage is downstream from marrying someone you really like. And because I don’t want to start by saying something bland and obvious, I will start with something that’s guaranteed to piss people off: one of the first smart choices we made toward having a good marriage was finding each other at 19 and 21.
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