Forty-one years ago we said those words, the husband and I.  I think we had a better than average understanding of what that meant, and here we are, still not parted by death or anything else. I cannot speak for both of us, but for myself, I have learned many useful things about marriage. And about men. And about the husband in particular.  

The most interesting thing is that we are still changing, and there is more new stuff to learn as that happens.  For our anniversary we are going to start a program called Prepare/Enrich (prepare-enrich.com) and our first task is to answer online questions about ourselves.  After all these years of living with the husband there are still things about his early years that I probably don’t know. And there are things about my early years that have formed my ways and views that I might not be aware of either. I am warned that there are about two hours worth of this questioning to wade through before we start the next part of the program. 

The next part is called “dating”, something we haven’t done regularly since being married.  Actually, it’s going to be double dating with a mentoring couple, and it’s supposed to be fun.  This whole concept is intriguing to me because it sounds very personal and potentially helpful.  It’s not a roomful of people at a marriage conference where no one knows what you’re thinking, it’s just the husband and I with two other people kind of like us but capable of objectivity and insight into our natures (because they get to see our two hours worth of answers from the online portion). We’ve never worked on our relationship intentionally like this before (yeah, it’s about time…) but like I said, forty-one years and we still haven’t killed each other.  Isn’t that what it means when you say until death do us part?