For Jana
When people learn we’ve been married forty years, they clap.
Not politely. Genuinely.
Because today, it’s a rarity. Somewhere between six and eleven percent of married couples ever reach this milestone together. Most don’t.
So let me tell you what it actually costs to get here. Let me tell you what she gave up.
What does a woman give up when she marries?
In my case, Jana gave up her own name and took mine. From that day forward, the world called her by it.
That was just the beginning.
The Threshold
Jana left a beautiful home for a one-bedroom apartment. The bedroom was too small for our bed, so we made the living room our bed instead. On the hottest summer nights, we soaked towels in water, laid them over ourselves, and aimed a fan at the bed just to sleep.
She gave up her sense of security climbing the back stairs to our apartment alone at night while I worked. She carried meals to me downtown, late, while I worked and went to school, fending off the hungry and the homeless who waited by the door for me to answer.
She never once asked me to choose a different life.
The Trials
She gave up her health to bring our children into the world. The first pregnancy put her in the hospital with a condition serious enough that she was transferred to the university hospital, where she lay on bed rest for over a month. Even then, they had to induce her a month early just to save her life. She went through some version of that crisis five times.
She gave up rest while I was in school and working nights. I’d come home at 4 a.m., sleep until 8, go to class until noon, then sleep again from one to five while she kept two small children quiet so I could. Then I had to study, which meant she was, in every way that mattered, raising our children alone.
One year we had so little money that for Christmas, we bought a hundred dollars of emergency food storage and put it under the tree. Our kids were too young to know what they were missing. Jana wasn’t.
The Abyss
At graduation, she gave up comfort again. We moved from Utah to Missouri, I drove the U-Haul, and she drove our car through the Rocky Mountains during one of the heaviest snowfalls on record. The rear-wheel drive handled terribly. She fought to keep the car on the road and her fear from reaching the children in the back seat. Turning around was never an option. She pressed on.
There were failed business ventures. There was the bankruptcy that cost us our house. While friends and family thrived around us, we simply survived. And she stayed.
The Revelation
Today, I still cry when she tells me that forty years ago, on this very morning, her mother walked into her room as she dressed for our wedding and said:
“I have never seen a bride so sure of her decision.”
That surety carried us through sickness and health. For better and for worse. Through everything I’ve just told you.
The Return
Today, our family of two has grown to twenty-one, twenty-two next month, when we welcome our eleventh grandchild.
So what is the secret to forty years of marriage?
Find a partner who refuses to give up when life feels uncertain. Who is willing to sacrifice their own comfort for someone else’s, again and again, without keeping score. People like that are rare. They are worthy of applause.
And then, this is the harder part, become that partner yourself.
Unless you believe you wouldn’t trade your own comfort for a relationship like this, for forty years, hear what you’d be missing:
the level of friendship and vulnerability that only comes from knowing your best friend for four decades. Watching five children grow into extraordinary humans who build families of their own. The wonder of grandchildren, reunions, Sunday dinners, soccer games, tennis matches, dance recitals, flute and violin and piano recitals. A heart bursting, again and again, with gratitude and pride and love.
There is no comfort, no security, no pleasure I would trade for these forty years.
Jana — thank you. I love you.