4 Birth Months Who Were Built for a Forty-Year Marriage
Imagine reaching your fortieth wedding anniversary and still having something you cannot wait to tell the person across the table. There is so much history between you, yet dinner can still run late because you are enjoying the conversation. For these four birth months, devotion lives in the everyday ways they keep choosing each other.
January
January, you hear a promise about the future and begin thinking about how to honor it. You want your partner to be able to make plans knowing you will do your part. There is tenderness in that dependability, especially when life becomes demanding. They can tell you they’re tired and trust you to help.
Over forty years, though, you would need to be the tired one sometimes. Letting your partner take over can be harder than volunteering for one more responsibility. It means trusting that you are still someone they want to love even on the evenings when you’re worn out. A lasting marriage gives your capable, determined heart somewhere to rest. You can leave a task unfinished, go to bed early, and hear them moving around the kitchen, taking care of things.
May
You would still bring home the fruit they wait all year to eat. May, this is part of what makes a long marriage appealing to you: the chance to learn someone’s pleasures so thoroughly that caring for them becomes woven into how you move through a day. You see something they would love and want them to have it. Even after decades, you enjoy watching their face when they realize you remembered.
There is the meal they request on their birthday, the spot you make beside you on the couch, the kiss you pause for even though you are both late. You would want those moments in your fortieth year, too.
September
September, when you apologize, you want your partner to feel the difference afterward. You remember to stop interrupting, to make decisions together, and to follow through after you say you understand. You can take love seriously enough to reconsider your own behavior.
Over the years, that gives your partner a reason to trust you with the difficult conversations. Your partner can tell you about a hurt while it is still small, knowing you will try to hear it. You get the same room to speak. Neither of you has to save every disappointment until it becomes evidence against the whole relationship. Some conversations will be awkward. You may need to begin again after getting defensive. But there is an intimacy in learning that an honest conversation can end with the two of you understanding each other better than you did before it began.
December
Forty years would give you a great deal to remember, December. You would also want something ahead of you to be curious about. Perhaps your partner suddenly becomes interested in a subject they used to find boring, or admits they would rather spend a holiday differently this year. You want to know what interests them now, even when it’s different from what brought you together.
This is one of the pleasures you would bring to a long marriage: room to surprise each other. The person you married gets to develop tastes you could never have predicted, and you get to discover them. At your anniversary dinner, they mention somewhere they would like to go. You have never heard them talk about it before. You ask what draws them there, and let the food grow cold while they tell you.