Anniversaries

We have a wedding anniversary coming up in less than two weeks.  Our 39^th.  Sometimes I just find it impossible to believe we have been married for so many years.  Those years have slipped through our hands like greased aquarium tubing.  Getting more slippery and falling through faster with each passing day.

We have had our issues, issues that had us setting up our separate camps as far apart, emotionally, as we could get while living under the same roof.  But we’ve always managed to turn back toward each other and clasp hands on the actual day of our anniversary.

This year will be different, though.  This will be the first anniversary to come up since I surrendered.  Since I gave up on the idea of ever getting back to the place of loving connection that we used to share.  Or at least, that I always believed we shared.  Maybe we never did.

After nearly forty years of trying to keep that connection alive…well, forty years minus the five hellish restaurant years that delivered the death blow and drove the nails into the coffin…I get that we don’t have that kind of relationship any more.  If we ever did.   I guess the fact that I had to try so hard to keep the connection alive casts doubt on whether it existed to begin with.  Or, at the very least, whether it was ever a vibrant, integral part of our partnership.  I suspect it was always just a pipe dream.

We are friends.  We like each other, most of the time.  We can live together in peace, for the most part.  I’ve found that my appetite for arguing has almost disappeared.  Fighting is only worthwhile if you’re fighting for something.  Since nothing is going to change, why bother?

So I am left wondering how exactly to “celebrate” adding another year to a marriage that has, in the end, fallen so short of what I had hoped it was, or would be.  It’s difficult for me to wax too rhapsodic about the length of the partnership…I feel like I’m being asked to celebrate quantity over quality.  I suppose it is wonderful that we’ve been together this long.  But I’m having a hard time working up any excitement over why and how we’ve made it this far. 

Because, to be honest…I don’t really know.