Marriage is filled with all kinds of stuff (how's that for deep) from life-changing memorable moments to painful experiences to loss to everydayness--mostly everydayness.
It would be easy to start with the memorable and the painful, so I'll start with the everydayness:
We've been extremely blessed to really like and love each other. We fit each other well. I'm the decisive, take charge, big picture guy, Jan is the more pragmatic, detailed person. Jan is fantastic with running the finances, for example. I hate that stuff. I'm good at taking out the garbage. Jan doesn't like to make decisions. One of our running jokes is the amount of time Jan used to spend in the toilet paper section of the grocery store agonizing over which toilet paper to buy. Good thing I like to grocery shop. I do most of it. Jan loves keeping house. She loves making the place homey. I love my work and Jan has always been a partner with me in it.
We share common interests. We both love British Mysteries and dramas (I even like the Jane Austin type stuff.) We both love reading. We both have the same tastes in TV shows (currently shows like Burn Notice, House, Psych, any British Detective show, etc.) We both love movies. I love to research them before we go. Jan likes the surprise of having no idea what we're seeing until the movie starts.
We both love having the dogs sleeping in the bed with us. We like salads. We like to travel. On vacations we have no problem being in the same place and doing our own thing--usually sitting on the beach reading. We are comfortable in silence. And we are good at talking to each other.
Jan gets more beautiful each day. I get older each day. Good deal for me. Not so good for her. Good thing it's for better or for worse...
We both love being parents, though it was not always easy. And we're thrilled to be grandparents.
We both need to see the Chiropractor once a week. Me for my back. Jan for her neck.
We are both into the same kind of music. We fell in love to Barry Manilow and have been fans ever since.
We prefer David Letterman over Jay Leno by a mile, and choose Dave over Conan though Conan is pretty good.
We both pursue our own things as well. Jan does lots of creating, sewing, photography, etc. I'm good at taking out the garbage.
We both use Macs. We both are adamant that we won't receive emails on our phones but Jan did sign up to receive Tweets from our kids.
We both like to spend the secondary holidays (4th of July, Memorial Day, etc.) watching a favorite movie and getting to be early. We're almost always in bed by 9 on New Years Eve.
We love sunsets in Hawaii and bright, full moons. We enjoy trying to catch a glimpse of the Space Station as it zooms through the dark sky.
We've both read the Harry Potter Series.
We have some differences but none that ever negatively impacted our relationship.
For me, the essence of a good marriage is found in this everydayness. Loving each other in the normal moments of life. Those moments keep us sane in the memorable and painful moments of a marriage.
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Joe and I like catching a glimpse of the space station (or watching for meteors, or any other cool sky stuff), too!
One night in the mid-80's, when our kids were little, we set our alarm for the middle of the night, woke the boys up, bundled them into the car, and took a 2-hour drive south and east so we could get to a really dark area to watch and take pictures of Halley's comet. Only to discover (when we got home) that there was no film in the camera! And it was the last night to be able to catch a glimpse of it.
Oh well, it was a picture that we've stored up in our hearts all these years.
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