My Secrets for Staying Married Thirty-Nine Years
The lost art of writing love notes
My wife and I celebrate thirty-nine years of marriage this month. Most of our friends call it a miracle. That’s because marrying a saint will make you a martyr. The real miracle is that my wife didn’t suffocate me in my sleep from all the stress I caused just by being myself.
Janice and I met during our first year in college. It was love at first sight for me, but not for her. She was one of the most popular girls on campus, and she already had a boyfriend, a senior, who could crush my underdeveloped body in a nanosecond.
Janice’s beauty radiated then, and it’s more glorious to me today. Despite the fuel of passion I felt whenever I saw her, it took me over three years to get my first date. In the meantime, like most college students, I did my best to overcome my deep-rooted insecurities of being away from home for the first time.
Janice and I became friends over the first few years of college. It was easy to run into each other often because we ran in similar circles. Plus, when we arrived at Ohio Wesleyan University in 1979, the student body was less than 1,500.
However, getting a date was nothing more than a dream I maintained through our senior year. But during the Spring of 1983, I asked Janice to…
