Today is our 19th wedding anniversary. It’s been a wild ride from the start. All marriages have their challenges, but I don’t know of many which have survived as many as ours.
We started dating in the summer of 1989, but our real relationship was actually born months later when we attempted to break up. Both of us had announced to friends that we were going to end the relationship. We walked into a room to have “the talk.” It was the first truly honest conversation we’d ever had. During the course of it we discovered that, far from wanting to break up, we wanted to date this cool new person we had just now met for the first time. Friends who had expected and even wished for the breakup were baffled, and so were we. But from that moment on nothing was going to keep us apart.
Though they’re likely to deny it today, both of our families were against us getting married. They said we were too young – we were only 22 at the time. But there were plenty of other objections. E was still in college, while also working as a line cook in a restaurant. I had just graduated college, working for barely more than minimum wage while trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. My family was devoutly Catholic, and E was protestant. We had no money in the bank and a mountain of college debts. We were living together – against our parents wishes – in the first floor of a dilapidated old house we wistfully recall as “the house of plague.”
But we had decided, patiently but persistently, that we belonged together. The more anyone else objected or tried to keep us apart, the more fiercely we clung to each other. When we decided to marry it was almost a defiant gesture aimed at all of those who didn’t want to take our relationship seriously.
Our lives had already become effectively married well before the wedding. E was the first person to ever accept me completely. She was the first person I ever came out to, even when I hardly knew what to call the thing I was coming out as. There was no secret about my life I couldn’t share with her, nor in hers she couldn’t share with me. She accepted my weirdness, as I accepted hers. Rather than trying to “fix” one another we accepted each other as we were. Since other people would only recognize the depth of our relationship if we had a ceremony and legal certificate, we did the wedding thing (only after, it should be noted, my parents flipped out when they discovered our plans to elope).
Because we married so young we we’ve seen each other change and grow SO much over time. We’ve been there through each others highs and lows. We’ve shared amazing joys and gut-wrenching sorrows. Sometimes we’ve felt like the perfect couple. Other times each of us has wondered whether we even belong together. The rises and falls are roller-coaster wild and unpredictable but, so far, every time it seems like we’re heading over a cliff we get to the bottom and chug right back up again.
My gender transition presented a new and formidable set of challenges for us. The emotional stress of transition pulls apart lives and marriages like almost nothing else, and we were not spared any of it. It has caused us to question our relationship about as fundamentally as anyone possibly can. And yet, gradually, we came through it together feeling closer than before.
However, as was the case early in our relationship, there are once again many people who want to break us apart. The notion that we’ve been together for 19 years, have three children together, and insist we want to stay together hasn’t prevented friends and family from repeatedly advising divorce. And that’s just the people who actually know us.
Now that we’re presenting as a same-sex couple there are fresh hordes of people who want laws passed against marriages like ours. Because I’m transsexual there are also some, including those from the church I was raised in, who want to declare our marriage annulled because I’m obviously insane, and so is anyone who would choose to stay with me. Still others want to consider our marriage invalidated because they don’t believe any marriage which survives gender transition can possibly be a “real” marriage on both sides of the divide.
I wonder if all the skeptics and doubters have any clue how strong a relationship can be. It’s not that it’s easy. Marriage takes work. But ours has been battered and tossed a lot more than most, so we at least have a pretty good idea about what can’t bring it down.
We used to believe it was our honesty that kept us together, but looking back that’s really not true. We’ve lost and regained our ability to communicate honestly many times, just as we’ve lost and rediscovered our friendship more than once. The marriage persevered through it all.
I think the real thing keeping us together through every challenge is that nameless thing we discovered all those years ago when we first tried to break up. Whenever we seriously ponder ending our relationship it just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t just mean it would make us sad, though surely that is true. But also it literally makes no sense. We fit. Out of all the people in the world we somehow found each other. The odds against it were staggering. The challenges were there from the start, but so was an amazing sense of belonging that we don’t experience with anyone else.
Just as there are no perfect people, there are no perfect marriages. Ultimately there are just marriages that work, and those which don’t. Ours is a marriage that just works, and the explanations are beside the point. We belong together and we are together and those two things don’t come together every time a couple says “I do.” But it did for us and I treasure it.
I love this entry, but your penultimate paragraph really spoke to me. “Whenever we seriously ponder ending our relationship it just doesn’t make any sense.” That’s what happened with us when push came to shove. We couldn’t imagine life without each other. This has meant compromises in ways we never imagined, but the loving relationship remains intact and still growing.
Congratulations on 19 years together! May you have many more to come.
Beautiful…honest and beautiful. Congratulations to you both. I have so much respect for anyone who is willing to look at things as they actually are, what they actually are. I think that’s the only thing that makes anything worth it. You are my people, and I’m glad about that.
I long to someday experience what you have described here, you are both truly fortunate.
Congratulations and happy anniversary
Cheers R
Congratulations. 🙂
You should celebrate with some cherry Popsicles.
Happy Anniversary!! As one of your friends that is lucky enough to experience this relantionship first hand, I’m very happy.
I still remember the day that you told me that E had decided to stay. The romantic in me makes me think she found the person she fell in love with all those years ago as Diana continued to grow.
You and E have such a wonderful family. Here’s to many more years of continued happiness.
Luv you, E and the kids. 🙂
Congratulations!
And a wonderful post, beuatifully written.
Stace
Much as Ariel, that bit really hit home and fairly reflects how my marriage has stayed in tact.
Congratulations on 19 years!!!
xoxo
[…] DriftersOff to see the world.An inspiring postwithout commentshttps://saladbingo.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/soulmate/About staying together as a couple … even when each person develops in their own unique way. […]
Wow, we do have a lot in common. Lots of differences, but a lot in common.
My wife and I were married 20 years ago, in Sept 1990. I was only 19. We had known each other 10 years before that, growing up together in the same Catholic parish. We often served at the altar together. We have two pre-teen kids, attended college together, have been 100% faithful, are great friends and partners, and generally agree on all the critical things (i.e. child-rearing and finances)
We’ve encountered all the criticisms you describe. Our answer always comes down to, “separate from the gender thing, what woman in her right mind would give up the relationship we have?” I’ve never had a woman come up with an answer to that one, even if they still don’t like “what I’ve done to her” and that I didn’t tell her until after we had one kid and another 6 months along. They lose sight of the fact this has always been OUR transition, not just mine, and that she’s changed as much as I have along the way (aside from the physical stuff).
All that said, it certainly is hard work. The hardest. But the return on investment is amazing. 🙂
Congrats on 19 years! Here’s a toast to many more decades to come!!! 😀