Our 35th wedding anniversary is this week, and it’s been almost a year since our oldest son was married in Ohio while we watched on Facebook Live in California, thanks to COVID-19 and the subsequent shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders. About a month before our son’s wedding last year, I was in a laundromat washing our king-size bedspread when a 20-something young man with a skateboard and a neon yellow marker struck up a conversation with me about marriage.
“Excuse me, are you married?” he asked me, talking over two large trash cans between us.
He had noticed that I wore two rings on my left hand, and he wondered if that meant I had been married twice. I explained the idea of engagement bands and wedding bands, and then he asked me how long we had been married. When I answered and followed up with “Why are you so interested in marriage?” he told me, “I was just wondering why people get married. Why did you get married? I mean, beyond all the love and romance stuff.”
“I guess it was just what we did in the 80s. Not that many people lived together before marriage back then. It wasn’t as widely accepted.”
“So you had a kid?” he continued.
“Yes, but not for a few years after we were married.”
He pondered his skateboard for a moment, drawing a heart shape on it with his neon highlighter. “What made your husband different than the boyfriends you had before him? Did he act better?”
“Yes, he was different, in some ways better and in some ways the same. I had to change. I had to get used to the idea that he was who he was.”
Our conversation continued, and I found out that he really didn’t know anybody who was married; none of his friends or family were. He had never been to a wedding. So he had to ask an older woman in a laundromat about the topic. She must have looked like she had experienced life and could be counted on to tell the truth as she saw it.
I hope he understood that when people say “marriage is work,” it means working on yourself. It means learning to accept your own shortcomings so that you can accept your beloved’s shortcomings, too. It means looking to the example and wisdom of our elders when things get difficult. Even if you have to go to a laundromat to do it.