The first seven.....

My husband has a marvelous marriage formula.

It goes like this:

The first seven years of marriage should be endured. Then they should be forgotten and discarded as if they never happened.

We married straight out of college. I was all of 22 years old, he had just turned 25. When I look back on us, I am amazed that we could actually pull off seven years.

What did we know then about choosing a life partner? What could any 22 year old know about choosing a life partner?

We had fun together. We liked the same music and he had a great stereo. He was pretty smart and very cute.

Of course, as a 22 year old, this was enough to convince me that I was meant to spend the rest of my life with him. So we got married. We did have a great wedding.

But a college romance and an engagement ring did nothing to prepare us for constructing a way to live together. We were so young and so immature, and both so convinced that personal happiness was the magic elixir the other person was supposed to provide.

Needless to say, we constantly failed each other, because we constantly missed the point. We argued. We endured prolonged and heavy silences. We waited for the other person to change.

To make a long story short, it took us about seven years to each realize, independent of the other, that we could only change ourselves.

We'd had our first child by this time, and things started to click into place. We became committed to something bigger than our own little selves and we grew up.

We'll celebrate our 29th anniversary this summer. I cringe sometimes thinking about our early history together. We both wanted so much and gave so little. I'm so glad that we persisted, so gratified that we didn't give up after the first seven. And besides, he's still pretty cute.