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Wedding Anniversary Memories

2009-01-23 Posted at 03:50:30 PM

Wedding Anniversary Memories

Sunday will mark the passing of twenty-nine years since my marriage to Glenn L. Strong. Our life together has been a fascinating adventure. We have traveled over much of the world; Europe, Asia, Mexico and the USA. That leaves a good part unexplored by us, but....those were fabulous adventures. Experiencing the differences and similarities among cultures made those fun, rewarding times.

Kids make life interesting

Glenn and I are best friends and still very much in love with each other. He has taught me more over the years than I ever dreamed I could learn from another human being.
Our relationship has not always been smooth, especially during the first years. You see, we began as a remarried couple with four children between us. Not only did we learn that they were constantly interfering with our world views, but they sometimes made it almost impossible to see through the fog. After all. it is difficult to predict outcomes when you've never entered a territory before. Our ignorance told us that our parental relationships would be similar to those in our first marriages. Wow, did we learn a lot!

Differing expectations throw curved in a relationship

I'll never forget our first Christmas together. Glenn loved the idea of decorating the house early as was the custom in his family. My family never deorated until Christmas eve. After some discussion, I decided that decorating early would be fine, especially since the children would all be gone to visit their other parents before Christmas eve. So Glenn put up the tree. It stood barren in the living room for about a week, when he confronted me about when I was going to decorate the tree. My response was that my father and ex-husband had always done that with the help of the children. He was absolutely astonished because his wife and the children had always done their tree. You can see here a good example of how past expectations lead to a lack of communication. There were many of these hurdles in our first years.

Interpretations of language create miscommunication

Another thing that sometimes threw rocks into our journey was the fact that the same word or phrase can have very different meanings. For example, if Glenn asked if I wanted to do something, I would often say, "if you want to"...in my family that meant "yes". In his it meant "I really don't want to, but I will if I have to". Consequently, we sometimes had to iron out misunderstandings created by our differences in interpretation of the English language. We soon learned to ask, "what do you mean when you say...." That saved us a lot of hurt and ruffled feelings.

I am so grateful and blessed to have enjoyed these past twenty-nine years.
Perhaps you might enjoy sharing some of your experiences with us as well.

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