After more than 29 years of marriage, my wife Lea and I have come to the conclusion that for a marriage to be successful – only one person can be crazy at a time. You can alternate who’s being crazy, but it’s a one- at-a-time thing. If she’s acting loony, I just have to wait my turn.

Another realization has been that it helps if you agree on the big stuff. For us, our half-joking mantra of, “no pets, no plants, no kids” has served us pretty well.

It’s amazing, really, to think that a couple — both at the ripe old age of 22 — could make an informed decision about how they want to spend their next 60 or 70 years. The key to that leap of faith has to be a willingness to let each other grow and evolve.

A friend wrote this toast recently for his son’s wedding that says it well:

Dance and play and rejoice in life. In your togetherness, let there be space.

Love each other unconditionally and steadfastly, but embrace the person they are, not who you want them to be. Let your love be like the moving seas between the shores of your souls.

As I reflect back on the role models I had for matrimony, the influences for a successful relationship go back a long way.

Going through files of my parents’ old photos and cards, I recently found a handwritten note from my dad to my mom. It was a love note – pure and simple.

It touched me for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that my dad was shy and not prone to talk about his feelings.

Dearest Evelyn,

I’ve decided to try and write on paper how I feel about you. I remember our courting days – when I could hardly wait to come and see you and didn’t want to leave you when it was time to go. Even now I hate to leave to go to work, and I can hardly wait to get home to see you.

I know we don’t have much money, but that’s not as important as being with you.

Eddie

I’m not sure what the occasion was; maybe it was a note slipped inside an anniversary card. I’ll never know, but I certainly understand why my mom kept it.

It reminds me of the lyrics from Bless My Soul, a song from Jeff Black’s wonderful CD, B Sides and Confessions:

I know why the baby cries
its way into the arms of a mother’s love.
I know why true love survives
and it is more than the red hot fire of another’s touch.

Sometimes life takes unanticipated turns, and you find yourself married but physically apart. There have been a few occasions in which a new job took me to a different city and Lea stayed behind to complete a teaching contract. For those who have done it, you know the difficulty of being apart for an extended period.

I will always remember the long summer of 1988, when Lea was studying for several weeks in Costa Rica on a Fulbright grant. It was 1,843 miles from San Jose to Russellville, Arkansas, and with no cell phones and limited ability to communicate, it felt further. During that time, I decided to record a version of And I Love You So, a Don McLean song sung at our wedding. The project filled my nights and weekends and hearing that recording today still brings back that sense of separation and longing for reconnection.

Shortly after my grandfather died, I remember talking with my Grandma Nola on the front porch of my uncle’s house. It was evening and the cars and trucks were traveling along I-70 in the distance. I asked her if she was going to be okay, and my diminutive grandmother said, “I’ll be fine. I have broad shoulders.”

This was just a few days after I had stood next to her at my grandfather’s casket. As she wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, she said, “I don’t regret a thing.” I realize now she wasn’t talking to me.

In the end, it wasn’t a decision we made 29 years ago to stay together no matter what. It was about choosing a person you loved, looking forward to who they would become and deciding day after day to continue the adventure. It is this same reaffirmation that Kentucky poet Wendell Berry makes in a poem to his wife entitled, The Wild Rose:

Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual
I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart.

Suddenly you flare again in my sight
A wild rose at the edge of the thicket

where yesterday there was only shade

And I am blessed and choose again,
That which I chose before.