Best Wishes to My Son and Daughter-in-Law on Their Wedding

Yesterday my son married his long-time girlfriend in a small and lovely ceremony in New York. So I’ve had weddings on my mind for many weeks.

I can’t help but compare their situation to my own. My son and his wife have been together for many years; my husband and I began dating one March and were married that November. My son and his wife wrestled with several important issues before their wedding; my husband and I didn’t have our first serious disagreement until almost a year after we were married.

As I’ve been reflecting on all this, I remembered a conversation I had with my mother the summer before my own wedding. My husband-to-be and I were both law students, and after we decided to get married, my parents had some concerns about whether I would finish law school and practice law. After all, my parents were paying for my degree.

In retrospect, I can see that my mother was in part concerned about what had happened to her. She graduated from college with honors in mid-June 1955 and was married ten days later. When I was born less than ten months after my parents’ wedding, she became a mother. From honors student to motherhood in less than a year. No wonder she worried about whether I’d be able to make use of my own degree.

“You know,” she said to me during our conversation in the summer of 1977, “Marriage isn’t always 50/50.” In her experience, it often had not been. She followed my father to his place of employment. She stayed home with the children, though she was intelligent, hard-working, and well-educated. Many would say she accommodated him more than he accommodated her during their marriage.

“No,” I replied with the blithe naïveté of a 21-year-old in love. “It should be 100/100.”

On one level, I was right. Marriage should be 100/100. Each spouse should be ready and willing to give 100% for the other.

But after 42 years of marriage, I can admit this is an ideal that is rarely obtained and never for very long. Sometimes marriage is 50/50. Sometimes it is 100/0. And most of the time it is somewhere in between. Marriage is a constant give-and-take between two individuals. Love and respect and mutual dependence help, but in the end, two people must each decide how to accommodate the other.

The most successful couples are able to talk about their differences and to do so with an attitude of caring. They try to understand the other person’s perspective and respect it. If they can’t give 100%, they at least try to give as much as they can. And if they can’t accommodate on one issue, they accommodate on other issues when they can.

The trick is to make it all seem both obvious and seamless. Obvious, because each partner should be aware of the other’s efforts, recognize them and be grateful. And seamless, because each partner should offer his or her accommodations out of love and without reproach.

Of course, I have failed abysmally in my own efforts to have a 100/100 marriage. As do we all.

But it still should be the goal.

Best wishes to my son and daughter-in-law! And may they have many moments of a 100/100 marriage.