Love and marriage... by Helen DePrima & Liz Flaherty

by Helen DePrima 

Anyone who claims unsullied bliss in a long marriage is either a saint or a liar – just my opinion. Approaching our fifty-third anniversary in August, I’ve finally concluded that a successful marriage consists of two imperfect people doing their best to create something a little better than one living alone. After the excitement of starting a new life together wears off, the hard work begins. My husband-to-be and I had been inseparable for three years at the University of Colorado and then toughed it through two years of separation while I finished nursing school half a continent away. Even so, we still had a lot of getting-to-know-you to accomplish once the wedding gifts were stowed and the thank-you notes completed.

Carl, bless his Sicilian heart, is bossy and impatient, while I’m lazy and willful. His good points: his utter devotion to family and his over-the-top work ethic during his veterinary career which survives in retirement as he plants and maintains a huge vegetable garden while doing most of the housework when I’m less than able. My virtues (I do have a few): an even temper, the ability to see both sides of an issue, and pride in not being a quitter. Still, surviving as a couple has often been a matter of sheer cussedness, of hanging onto the hope of better times ahead. Maybe, because I grew up with my grandparents, I absorbed their Depression-era philosophy of mending and making do rather than discarding in favor of newer and better.

I never got to see my parents’ marriage in action -- my mother died when I was tiny – but I was always instinctively aware of my grandparents’ devotion until their deaths in their eighties, less than a year apart. She would scold and he would sigh, but love was always close to the surface in a touch, in words of endearment or in small kindnesses. My grandfather always saw her as the beautiful 18-year-old from Indianapolis who defied her parents to elope with the son of a Kentucky potato farmer.

So, my best wishes to all brides, new and old – hanging in is worth the effort. I think.

by Liz Flaherty

“A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.” - Andre Maurois

I was an almost-June bride, since we got married on May 29 in order to take advantage of the Memorial Day weekend. We worked the Friday before we married and Duane would go back to work the Tuesday after. My dress was a light blue mini that cost $14.99, my shoes came off the clearance rack and were a half-size too small, and I was so excited.

At twenty and twenty-two, I was a single mother long before it was fashionable and he'd just returned from Vietnam to the job he'd had before he was drafted and that they didn't want to give back to him. If we hadn't received money as wedding gifts, we wouldn't have been able to afford to spend even our wedding night in a motel. 

When I look back on that, I'm surprised that we did. We had rented a furnished apartment to start our marriage in--I don't know why we didn't just go there. We could have used the $10.50 we spent at the Curlee Motel on groceries.

I don't remember much about being a bride. Even then, it was all about the marriage. We were products of unhappy ones and were determined to make ours better, to make the joy last, to keep talking even when talking hurt. Forty-nine years in, we have done that. Mostly. 

Except for when we haven't. And those times have probably done as much to strengthen the relationship as the good days. It is the bad days that make me love reading (and writing) stories about marriages that are resurrected from the fields of pain where they sometimes find themselves. It's why I love reading about "seasoned" protagonists, because we have a really good handle on what it takes to achieve a "mostly" Happily Ever After. 

I join Helen in sending best wishes to all the beautiful June brides--or brides of any other month, too. I hope each of you gets her own Mostly Happily Ever After. Make the joy last. Keep talking.