I came home from the office on Monday, February 14th to a quiet house. It was Valentine’s Day, and there were no flowers in a vase nor cards or gifts on the kitchen counter. My spouse had not made restaurant reservations, nor had he bought groceries for a special dinner. Don was working in his study, his ever-present sense of engineering duty consuming him. We threw together our standard, almost-daily, dinner salads and chuckled at how unromantic we were. We settled into our evening routine with practiced perfection and later crawled into bed with relief that our busy day was over.
The way we spent Valentine’s Day says nothing about how I feel about my husband.
I remember every mistake I have made in my life with exacting detail. The things I have done well are harder to conjure up. I now follow the advice of health-care professionals, and I am thoughtful about how I spend money. I am a diligent homeowner, and dirty dishes never linger in the sink. But those attributes only originated after a vast inventory of making bad choices, such as not going to the dentist for four years, or, in the early years of my marriage, landscaping the front yard and paying for it with a credit card thinking I could pay it off in a month. I once booked an ocean cruise for our family when our children were young, and to save money, I reserved an interior cabin so small, it made an office cubicle feel roomy. The list of bad decisions goes on interminably.
But I made one impeccable choice: thirty-eight years ago, I married the right guy.
Meeting Don was more happenstance than destiny. We met in a stairwell landing in the office building where we both worked; Don was a young engineer, and I worked as a technical writer prior to going to law school. Don was talking to a senior designer at the moment our paths crossed, and he told Don that he thought I might be single. That conversation was the singular moment that started a trajectory that has lasted more than forty years.
But more fortuitous than our meeting is how our core personalities align. We view the world in fundamentally the same way. We never question when the other person needs to work. For both of us, hard work is a given, not an exception. We agree on how to spend our money and our free time. Loyalty is intrinsic to who we are. We are stubborn to a fault about the things that matter, and we’ve got no quit.
On the evening before our recent 38th wedding anniversary, my niece’s husband asked us the secret to a long and happy marriage. Don paused, and said it was because he always has the last word in any discussion, which is, “yes, dear.” I said it was because his jokes never get old, and he always makes me laugh. If I ask him if he is getting a haircut and he doesn’t say, “no, I am getting them all cut,” then I will know it is time for us to seek relationship counseling.
We took a vacation day this past week to celebrate our anniversary, and we spent two nights in a treehouse BNB. At bedtime, we tiptoed our way to the communal bathrooms, the stillness of the night heightening my sense of peaceful gladness. Don walked a step ahead of me, shining the flashlight on the trail so that it illuminated my pathway more brightly than his own. He stood by patiently while I went through my thorough evening cleansing ritual. Back at the treehouse, he waited for me to pick the side of the bed I wanted before slipping in beside me. The million little things he does for me are more loving and meaningful than any gift or flowers he could ever purchase.
I think next Valentine’s Day, we will celebrate exactly the way we did this year. Except maybe we will go a little crazy and skip the salad and eat pizza, instead. We may be comfortably mired in familiar routine after forty years of togetherness, but then again, we still have a few tricks up our sleeves.