Staying together after marriage

Before we had been married a year, a military commitment took me away from my wife for four months (though we did manage to work in some weekends together). When that was over, I promised her that we'd never spend another night apart.

Silly me!

We have, of course, spent some nights apart over the past 38 years, and this week we're spending a longer stretch apart than we've endured in many years. There have been brief hospitalizations, business trips (though I was fortunate enough to take my wife and children along to many of the newspaper meetings I attended) and family commitments that kept us apart. This week, my wife is helping out following the birth of our newest grandchild (number six, if you're counting), providing the invaluable help she never got because her mother died before our children were born. I know she's enjoying it far more than spending her days at work and her nights with an old man she can just barely remember as young.

I also spent some time there and tried to make myself useful, but there really wasn't much for me to do, and I returned home in the vain hope that I might be called for a job interview and with the knowledge that I could more readily job hunt and fill out applications from home. Besides, the dog was happy to see me.

The biblical description of marriage, that "the two shall become one flesh," can be read as good advice. Couples who match their schedules to each other's and spend the maximum amount of time together — eating meals together, getting up at the same time, going to bed at the same time, sharing chores, travels and hobbies — become a new creation, two lives merged into one. A friend from years ago described marriage this way, that it's not really two people becoming one but two halves, each incomplete without the other, becoming whole. Anyone who has been blessed with a good marriage knows what a miracle that transformation is. I have described it as the embodiment of divine grace, that is, an undeserved gift.

One phrase from a relatively unknown John Denver song ("Back Home Again") perfectly captures the rhapsody of marital life: "It's the sweetest thing I know of, just spending time with you." (Be patient, the quoted phrase comes more than three minutes into the song.)