SMALL WISDOM

I married young.  Not young if you consider the age of everyone who has ever been married – if you do, I was probably married quite a bit older than average.  I was twenty.

It’s been a year and a half.  A year and a half doesn’t make you wise.  All it does is make you wiser.  In twenty years I will be wiser still.  As my father has told me, the more you learn, the less you know.  The more I learn, the more I realize I have yet to learn.  It’s true for more than marriage.

I consulted with my friend Agatha Christie on the subject of being married.  She left this world before I entered it, but I read her autobiography and we became friends despite the difference in our ages.  In life Agatha Christie was a wise woman.  This is what she said about marriage.

If you can’t face your man’s way of life, don’t take that job – in other words, don’t marry that man.  Here, say, is a wholesale draper; he is a Roman Catholic; he prefers to live in a suburb; he plays golf and he likes to go for holidays to the seaside.  That is what you are marrying.  Make up your mind to it and like it.  It won’t be so difficult.

This is the sum of my wisdom after sixteen months of marriage.  When you marry, you marry a person, not the idea of a person.  My husband is not a wholesale draper or a golf player or any of those things, but he is equally as specific, which is exactly the point.  You don’t marry the way a person looks or the way that person makes you feel.  You marry who they are, what they do, what they think.

I married this man, my husband, and all of who he is.  I love who he is.  He is funny and annoying and sweet and loud and helpful and he drives me crazy.  And he makes me happy.  I have made up my mind to like all of him.  As Agatha Christie said, it hasn’t been so difficult.  It has been very good.