This November fifth Keith and I will celebrate being married fifty-three years. Someone tell me where the years have gone, please! I remember thinking, on that day, that we were the only two people in the world who could possibly love each other so much, ah young love. I was two months short of my seventeenth birthday (I know, I know, I was very young) and Keith was nineteen. There were people who thought, because I was so young, that we had to get married, but that was not the case at all. We simply knew what we wanted. Looking back after all these years I know without a shadow of a doubt that God had His hand on us all along. There were those, I'm certain, who expected our marriage to fail but that was something we never even considered. We took vows and intended to honor them, regardless of what we faced and we have continued that philosophy to this day. We have had our ups and downs, like any couple, but made sure to never use the word divorce as a weapon. If you open yourself up to that tactic it will one day become your way out even if the situation is reparable and love still exists. Divorce hurts so many people and should always be the last resort. I am grateful that we never had to walk that path as I have seen the pain it can cause in the lives of people I love.
I do not claim to know all the answers on how to have a good marriage. What I do know is that I have a husband who is considerate of my feelings, thinks of me before himself, keeps me laughing, and after fifty-three years still thinks I'm hot. That last one is very good for the ego even if it just may be a case of needing his prescription in his glasses changed. It is that kind of thing that makes me love him to this day. They say love is blind and I finally understand.
