by Paige Zeller

Created on: December 08, 2009

When my mother said “I do” for the third time in her life, I remember thinking to my then 10-year-old self that it wasn't going to last. My mother, lovely woman that she is, has terrible taste in boyfriends and worse taste in husbands. Unsurprisingly, she divorced my stepfather after years of alcoholism, subsequent recovery and, adding insult to injury, unfaithfulness. By her thinking, she had married solely for love and what love had existed had long-since faded, so there was no reason to remain in the relationship.

The failure of my mother's marriages, coupled with statistics and other personal experience, soured me on the idea of a forever marriage. I began to believe that marriage was only good for romance or money, and that it was a terrible idea meant only for the sentimental or the unimaginative. I have since had a change of heart.

A few years after my mother's last divorce, I was married in a small, rushed outdoor ceremony in my father's backyard to a man I had only dated for 10 months. We were marrying because I had opened my big, fat mouth and told him to do something with himself. Unfortunately, that something was to join the Navy. Although we could have survived as a couple without marrying, access to him would have been more limited and it would have caused a great deal of trouble. So, we decided to get married based on the knowledge that we would have married eventually anyway.

Due to the reason for the timing of my marriage, my family is skeptical at best about our chances for survival and have taken every opportunity to remind me of it. They are certain that I rushed into marriage without a full understanding of what I was doing or what it meant to say “till death do us part.” While both my husband and I are in our late 20's they insist on treating our marriage like some sort of teenage shotgun wedding, doomed to failure due to circumstances. And to them I offer a dignified and resolutely upraised middle finger.

Perhaps because my mother's marriages have turned out to be less than spectacular, when I was deciding whether or not to marry my husband, I thought back to my grandparents and their 50+ year relationship, which was predicated on mutual respect and complementary behavior. They tried to supply what the other lacked and to work with each other to move through things. Even though they argued, there was never any question that they would stay together and there were many ways in which they interacted that reminded me of my husband and me.

Marriage is not for narcissists or the unrealistic, it is for people are willing to give of themselves and understand their partners. Self-sacrifice, patience, and a willingness to adapt are all necessary to make a marriage last. But, even more than that, it is a dedication to the idea that the marriage is supposed to be a forever partnership, rather than an easily-broken promise.

On the day that we went to the alter, as strange and unexpected as it was, my husband and I consciously promised to be partners forever. Although it is difficult to know what the future holds, I am hoping that my relationship with my husband will only grow stronger as time goes on. Circumstances may have dictated the timing of our vows, but dedication to them is what will make them last.

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