A great paragraph

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....from the Frederica Matthewes-Green article on NRO today. She talks about the follies of having hyphenated their last names 30 years ago after their "hippie wedding." (Her words, not mine!)

But she ends up with:

The hyphenated name wasn't a noble experiment, it was just a sign of the times, good for a few laughs, a few scrapbook pages of mangled address labels. It wasn't the important thing. So if you're planning a wedding right now my advice is: don't plan a wedding. Plan a marriage instead. Make it wonderful, and when it isn't wonderful, make it last.

I like it! We are, as a culture, far too ready to throw in the hat at the earliest sign of trouble. Too many soap operas. Too many hours of Oprah. Too many movies. Too many romance novels. When the going gets tough, too many of us just check out.

In 25 years of marriage, PapaC and I have had our share of good times and certainly our share of bad ones. And yeah, sometimes the bad times lasted for more than a few days. Heck more than a few weeks or months!! Many people we know went through similar things--very few are still married. Why? I dunno. I don't think we're "gifted" at marriage. We just won't budge. It was forever. Period.

I suppose it comes from both of us having mothers who told us the following:

"Who ever told you life was gonna be fair?"

"Who ever told you you would have fun every day?"

"Where do you go to give up? NOWHERE. There isn't anywhere. So just buck up."

We were lucky. We knew from early on this wasn't any old rose garden. I never expected a handsome prince to come and rescue me from anything. We both expected to have to work our way through the world. So the fact that marriage was sometimes hard wasn't a real surprise to us.

Maybe it is to a lot of folks.

2 Comments

Hyphenating names may be more tempting when you've got something like "Matthewes" and "Green". I knew from the beginning that "O'Connell-Wangersky" just wouldn't work.

We need folks like you in marriage prep!

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