Just a lot of talk

Today is my wife’s and my twentieth wedding anniversary. Wedding anniversaries are odd things—holidays that are only really important to a very small number of people (in our case just two).

Catholic practice has things called “sacraments”. A sacrament is a special blessing, a source of grace. The sacraments are mostly associated with the everyday things of life: birth, eating and drinking, healing, becoming an adult, love and sex, sickness and death. So when we say these things are sacraments what we are saying is that our lives are good and we believe the world is a holy place.

In the Roman Catholic tradition a sacrament has several components: the agent or conferrer, the recipient, the outward sign of the sacrament, and the significand—that which is signified.

We believe that marriage is a sacrament—a source of grace and blessings—and it certainly has been that for me. The conferers of the sacrament are the couple themselves (not the priest); the recipients, too, are the couple; the sign is their recitation of vows; and what is signified is their commitment of love to one another.

So, in this context, its easy to see why marriage is mostly important to the married couple themselves and the celebration of a wedding anniversary all the more so. Nonetheless, my joy at this commemoration is such that I wanted to share it with you all and, perhaps, offer a few thoughts that might be interesting or helpful to you.

I love my wife more today than I did on the day we were married. She’s my best friend and helper and, well, I think she’s one of the very finest people I know. I’ve only found one great fault in her: she’s too hard on herself.

I also think that our marriage—along with those of our parents—is one of the very best that I know of and I think that most of our friends, relatives, and acquaintances would agree with that. Not that it doesn’t have its strengths and weaknesses. My wife, of course, is responsible for most of the strengths while I hold up my end by supplying most of the weaknesses—these I possess in great abundance. An embarrassment of riches.

I’ve heard it said that the secret of a good marriage is self-delusion. I don’t believe it for a second. I think that the secret of a good marriage is talk. And our marriage is based on talk, not just on the marriage vows we exchanged twenty years ago but on the continual exchange of thoughts and feelings and wishes and fears over those twenty years.

Our life together is little like what I imagined it would be twenty years ago. To be honest I still want what I imagined and mourn that we’ll never have it. But I love our life together as I never imagined I would.

I love you, Sweetheart. Let’s keep talking!