10,950 days and I wouldn’t change a thing
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- May 25, 2020
- 1216
If I could pinpoint the exact science that makes a marriage work, I’d be toiling until time stood still.
It is a living, breathing organism that evolves over the seconds and minutes of years. It is the breaths you exhale from crying and the air you cannot suck into your lungs from laughing too hard. It can be the worst place to lay your head down at night and the most exquisite place to wake up inside of. There is a separateness that must remain to make a marriage last, and I implore you to find it. Because losing yourself to another person makes you, well, lost.
On May 26 we will raise a toast to 30 years of marriage. 30.
I tiptoe softly through memories and know now marriage is hallowed, unkempt ground. It’s littered with the messy crumbs of mistakes and sorrows, along with the hopes we realized and the ones that still dangle.
We were so young and dumb and invincible, and I look back on us as taking on the world because we could, because they told us no and we didn’t care and said yes anyway, which is how it should be. Because where do you get by playing it safe every day of your life?
I sometimes think about the people that asked me, then, why I would go through so much to marry George. I think about the time it took them to formulate the question and present it to me, out loud. I wonder if they know I still think about that question, still turn it around in my head for a moment and would still answer the same way: because I love him. I’d cross a hundred burning suns just for another 30 years with him, even if his love makes me crazy every second of every day.
Marriage, whenever and with whomever you enter it with, shouldn’t be a solemn affair. It is complete and utter chaos combined with getting to spend the rest of your life with someone that should challenge you, free you, never contain you and in no way silence your true voice.
This doesn’t happen overnight, and if I’ve said it one million times, I’ll say it again — fight for those things. There is no relationship that heads into marriage being textbook perfect, and after the wedding is over, it’s only the two of you staring at each other and a lifetime to get it right.
After 30 years of marriage, we’re both still fighting for things, falling into past arguments that remain warm and fuzzy and familiar, and trying to claw our way out of the familiar so we don’t repeat the same patterns for another 30 years.
We had a world of differences facing us when he pulled that big veil up over my head and kissed me: cultural, familial, regional and more. But I believed it would work, and so did he — despite the things that went wrong, despite the many times we both wanted to run away from each other.
I married the most stubborn man alive, and he would say he married the most stubborn woman. We embrace our differences and honor them as a holy tabernacle. I bring him coffee and eggs every morning, and he watches any movie I could ever want to watch at any time with me. I tell him every day the coffee cup he leaves on the counter top will be the only reason we divorce, and he gets annoyed at all the cats underfoot I can’t seem to take to the animal shelter.
And when we lay down at night, him with all the blankets over his head and me half covered by a sheet, as long as I can find his feet under the blankets, I can fall asleep.
I would do everything the same if given the choice to start over. Feliz treinte anos, mi amor.