The Life We Learned to Share

When we first married, we were much younger, and like most young couples, we probably knew less about marriage than we thought we did.

I was just beginning my career as a doctor. Those early years were not financially easy, and money became one of the first places where we discovered how different two people could be even when they loved each other. We had grown up in different families and developed different ideas about spending, saving, and what was necessary. At the time, we did not always understand that these disagreements came from somewhere. We simply thought the other person was being unreasonable.

So we argued.

Looking back after nearly thirty years, some of those arguments seem almost amusing now, but they did not feel amusing then. When you are young and have not been married very long, every disagreement can seem much more serious because you do not yet have the confidence of knowing how many disagreements a relationship can survive.

We gradually developed our own way of getting through them. If an argument became too heated, we learned to stop rather than keep adding words we would later regret. Sometimes we would go off separately and remain quiet for a while. Then, almost without announcing it, one of us would begin to move back toward the other. Someone would prepare something to eat, a small joke would break the tension, and ordinary life would resume.

There was no great theory behind it. We simply became familiar with each other's rhythms.

Over the years, I began to understand how much of marriage involved learning the person who was actually beside me rather than continuing to argue with the person I wished they would become. I had my habits and my stubbornness; my wife had hers. There were things we could change for each other, but there were also parts of our personalities that remained remarkably resistant to improvement despite decades of helpful suggestions.

My faith encouraged me to look more often at myself. It was much easier to identify what my wife should change than to notice the ways I contributed to the same conflict. That realization did not suddenly make me an ideal husband, but it did make some arguments shorter.

My wife was learning in her own way. Her work in image design had always made her sensitive to how people present themselves, but she also cared deeply about what was happening beneath the surface. Over time, both of us became less interested in making the other person conform to our expectations and more interested in finding a way for two different personalities to live comfortably together.

One of the biggest changes was learning to give each other space.

Earlier in marriage, we probably assumed that a close couple should do most things together. As the years passed, that expectation relaxed. We discovered that one person could go out with friends while the other stayed home, or one could pursue an interest the other did not particularly enjoy. We did not have to monitor each other's time or participate in everything together in order to feel secure.

That freedom made our marriage easier.

We also learned to keep many of our disagreements between ourselves. Bringing parents or relatives into a quarrel often gave a temporary frustration a much longer life. We might forgive each other the next day, while someone who loved us could continue remembering the offense. Eventually, we became better at protecting the little world we had built together.

As our marriage matured, the arguments did not disappear, but they changed. We knew each other's temperaments better. We knew when the other person needed to be left alone and when silence had gone on long enough. We learned to use humor, and we became better at recognizing that not every irritation deserved to become a serious discussion.

We also became more conscious of appreciation. It is strange how easily people praise each other when they first fall in love and how quickly compliments can disappear into the routines of marriage. After years together, it became important to remember that familiarity should not make the other person invisible.

Somewhere along the way, our relationship became less about the intensity of being a young couple and more about companionship.

When I look at my wife now, I do not see only the woman I married. I see all the years between then and now. I remember the period when I was a young doctor and we worried about money, the arguments we once thought were terribly important, the evenings when one of us had to soften first, and the gradual discovery that we did not have to agree about everything in order to have a good life together.

She has watched me change, and I have watched her change. Neither of us became exactly the person the other might once have imagined, and perhaps that is fortunate. We became ourselves.

Nearly thirty years is a long time to share a life with another person. By now, we know each other's strengths and weaknesses too well to maintain many illusions. There are habits I am sure she would still happily remove from me, and I could probably prepare a small list of my own. But the desire to correct each other has softened with age.

What has replaced it is something quieter.

We know how to give each other room. We know how to return after an argument. We know that sometimes a meal says more than another explanation, and that a little humor can rescue an evening that has become unnecessarily serious. Most of all, we have learned that being married does not require two people to become the same person.

When we were young, we were trying to build a marriage while also building ourselves. We did not always know the difference.

Now, after almost three decades, I think we understand each other better because we have finally allowed each other to remain different.

Our marriage was not made by discovering a secret to happiness. It was made much more ordinarily—through work, money worries, arguments, meals, apologies, faith, laughter, separate interests, shared responsibilities, and thousands of days when we simply came home to each other.

We began as two people trying to learn how to live together. Somewhere along the way, almost without noticing when it happened, we became two people who knew how.