Today is
Barry’s and my fortieth wedding anniversary. When we entered our fortieth year of
marriage last summer, it was not clear that we would make it to this milestone.
But here we are, and I have to say it’s pretty cool.
Thinking
about this, the statistician in me kicked in, and I wondered how many couples
stay married for 40 years these days. According to the U.S. Census Bureau,
Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), 2008 Panel, Wave 2 Topical
Module (for information on sampling and non-sampling error, see www.census.gov/sipp/sourceac/S&A08_W1toW3(S&A-12).pdf),
50% of women and 60% of men who married between 1960 and 1964 made it to their
40th anniversaries. More
recent data is not yet available, and it is not clear whether the couples
divorced before the milestone anniversary or simply did not live long enough to
reach it. Either way, since the
percentage of couples making it to various milestone years appears to be
decreasing over time, getting to 40 years seems to be a reasonably significant
accomplishment.
Of course
none of this addresses the quality of marriages. People stay together for lots
of reasons: financial considerations, children, social pressures, convenience.
But Barry and I have been truly blessed to be content together for these forty
years. If anything, the events of this tumultuous past year have driven this
point home to us more strongly than we could have ever imagined.
When my
brother Joe and his wife Judy celebrated their 40th wedding
anniversary a couple of months ago, I learned that the traditional gift for
that milestone is rubies, and we gave them a red crystal Waterford bud vase. Barry
must have kept that in mind, and this morning he handed me a small box with a
beautiful pair of ruby earrings. After he gave them to me, he told me a funny
story. He shopped for this gift on one of the days he spent in his
office. Barry and I share credit cards, so to keep this from me he paid cash
for the earrings. The proprietor of the little Upper East Side jewelry shop was
clearly unaccustomed to patrons paying with cash, and after a bit of banter
Barry realized that she almost assuredly thought that he was not buying the earrings for his wife! After
all, how many smart, generous, good-looking guys on the Upper East Side of
Manhattan have been married to the same woman for forty years?
As we
pass this milestone, we are fortunate to have our younger daughter and her
children staying with us for a few fun-filled days in New York City, and
grateful for the blessings bestowed upon us. Let’s hope we can make it to the
half-century mark!
Love,
Rebecca
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