Musing from a contemplative mind....

This Wednesday my parents will celebrate 40 years of being married together. In a society when one in two marriages end in divorce, that is no small task. I for one have to be very honest and say that I never thought this day would come. My childhood was spent in fear that there would be another all night fight and I would wake up in the morning to scene of broken dishes, alarm clocks, phones, mirrors - you name it. As I grew I made a list of all the things I would not do when I got married using my parents marriage as the model of what not to do in many situations. Now conflicts happen. All married people fight from time to time. But there are three things that I learned as result of their inability to communicate well.

1. About 90% of all fighting is a result of one person not respecting the other person’s opinion as equal to their own.
2. The motto for my life, and subsequently my approach to my own marriage, "The Only big deals are the ones we choose to make."
3. If you say it louder, it doesn't make people listen more, but less.

That being said, I never doubted that they loved each other. That was always obvious. So here is to two people who beat the odds and showed that they were true to their vows and to each other. You weren't the model of marriage, but you modeled something equally important to me. Commitment.