Today's Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul

[Guest guest]

On Our Twentieth Wedding Anniversary

I smile when someone defines bigamy as having one spouse

too many and monogamy as being the same thing. Instead, I think

of marriage as a lifetime communication adventure. It has

certainly been that with my husband, Marty.

Marty and I have been together for over twenty full, rich

years.

He is, I would say with complete affection, just an

ordinary kind of guy, in a very down-to-earth way. For

instance, recently I told Marty I was thinking of taking up

painting. He glanced at me, and without missing a beat, asked:

" Semigloss or latex? "

That's Marty.

I remember in the months before our twentieth wedding

anniversary, I began to think about our marriage and wonder if,

indeed, it was all it should be. Nothing was wrong, mind you.

But there just didn't seem to be any " newness " in our

relationship anymore. I remembered the long-ago magic of being

in a new relationship - the excitement of meeting someone you

didn't know anything about and slowly discovering all the

adorable details of his personality; the joy of finding out what

you had in common; the first date, the first touch, the first

kiss, the first snuggle, the first everything.

One morning, my well-worn husband and I were up early

taking our customary walk of about four miles. Even though the

scenery was beautiful, my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking

about all the things that seemed to be missing after twenty

years of marriage, and if, indeed, I was missing out on new

things I should be experiencing. We had just reached the two-

mile point in our walk, a shady spot where two cedar trees

create a natural secluded archway above us. And as we were

about to turn around, my husband reached over, took me in his

arms and kissed me.

I was so busy thinking about all the " new " things I was

missing out on, his kiss totally caught me by surprise.

And there in the middle of a hot, sticky, sweaty, exercise-

panting kiss, I was suddenly flooded with an awareness of the

cumulative gifts of twenty years of living with Marty. We had

comforted each other through the deaths of three parents and two

brothers. We had seen his son graduate from Virginia Tech. We

had camped from Nova Scotia to the Canadian Rockies. We had

shared songs with my family in Ireland one Fourth of July, and

we had hiked along the Bay in Anchorage, Alaska. We had shared

a lot of potatoes, a lot of surprises and a lot of life.

I did not have this special level of sharing with any other

human being - only with my husband. And right now, we were

sharing something new. A walk, a sweet, safe, comfortable

companionship that offered new love each day, and a kiss that

had never happened before and would never happen again. This

moment was new, as each moment always would be.

That day, our twentieth anniversary took on a completely

different meaning, one that has stayed with me every day since

then - inside our oldest commitments can lie our newest

celebrations.

By Maggie Bedrosian

Reprinted by permission of Maggie Bedrosian © 1998, from

Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor

Hansen, Mark & Chrissy Donnelly and Barbara De Angelis, Ph.D.