Today I attended a reception for some friends who were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. It was a great time with them, their families and friends celebrating together. I congratulate them on 50 years together and send my best wishes for many more years together.
While I was sitting there enjoying the food and festivities my mind flashed back to an experience I had sometime around 1991 or so. Another couple I knew was celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and I had stopped at a PharMor store to get a card. When I handed the cashier the card she looked at it for a moment and then said, "I didn't know people actually stayed married that long anymore."
It does appears to be the exception rather than the rule in our day. But, even in our cynical and jaded times it does still happen . In fact, in 4 years my wife and I will actually be celebrating our own 50th. wedding anniversary. So yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus and yes people do stay married to each other for a lifetime. Oh I know it is becoming less common than it once was but it does still happen.
I suppose if you were to ask people in general how it is possible for people to stay married for so long you'd get a number of responses. Chief among the answers would probably be that they stayed together because "they loved each other." Now I would hope that couples who get married actually love each other or at least believe that they love each other at the time they married.
After nearly forty years of active ministry I have never counseled a single couple or performed a ceremony for a couple who did not profess their love for each other. However, I know that many of those marriages ended in divorce within a few years . . . some within a year. There are, no doubt, a lot of reasons for those marriages not succeeding. Apparently while "love" may have brought them together it was not enough to keep them together.
Now I don't want to get involved today in a long discussion of was it really love or was it lust that brought them together. Nor do I want to explore whether it was "real" love or an infatuation or perhaps obsession with each other that brought them together. I don't even care whether or not it was an "arranged" marriage." Those may be interesting and profitable discussions for another time but don't really have much to do with my curiosity today.
I actually know a few couples who admit that when they married they did not love each other. In one case the marriage was a way out of a bad home and they other because there was no home. These were marriages of convenience. The remarkable thing is that one couple has been married for more than 50 years and the other more than 45 years. Love for them came later. So much for being in love explaining why couples stay married.
In my experience virtually everyone for whom I performed a wedding ceremony professed that they were in love. I just take them at their word. Were they in love? . . . maybe they were and maybe they were not. I might have questioned their understanding of love, their maturity and/or their commitment but never that they believed they were in love. You see I am not interested in why so many marriages fail. I want to know why some last a lifetime.
People may be in love with each other when they marry but they do not always feel or act lovingly toward each other. Marriages that last face all the same challenges of life as those that do not. Marriage is never easy . . . it is always demanding . . . and there will be plenty of opportunities for calling it quits. It takes a lot of commitment to persevere. But those who do eventually reach a point where they cannot even image life without each other. Those are the couples who will celebrate a lifetime of loving each other.
Neil Sedaka wrote a song called "Love Will Keep Us Together" and it believe it will if it is accompanied by a good healthy dose of committed to each other.
