Secrets to a successful marriage

Originally titled "Staying Together," from the August 2007 issue of Canadian Living Magazine, on newsstands or click here for the back issue.

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The day my husband, Brad, and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, our 17-year-old daughter, Kathryn, paid tribute to us with a card that read, in part: “I'm so proud of my parents. I know for sure that the last 10 years or so weren't easy -- and there were probably rocky points before then, too. But you made it, and for that I am infinitely thankful [because] as long as Mom and Dad are OK, everything is OK….”

The right decision
Her note was about 200 words -- just a few handwritten sentences, really -- but it was a profound affirmation that staying together was the right decision.

As we brushed tears from our eyes, Brad and I each felt a painful stab of memory: Both our parents had divorced shortly after their own 25th anniversaries, after repeated separations that began years earlier.

Brad and I were already in our 20s and married when those marriages finally came unglued, and though the divorces were different -- one stormy, the other silent -- the consequences were the same: all six children (three in each family) felt instantly diminished.

Brad and I cried over our daughter's card because we understood the depth of her fear and knew what it felt like to be betrayed by the two people you love the most. But we also cried with relief: Here was proof that despite myriad mistakes we had made in raising our children (a list that would require a hard drive upgrade), we had somehow managed to get this important thing right.

Finding something solid
I met Brad in 1974 when I was 14 years old. In the spring of 1980, while travelling through France together, our high school friendship matured into something like love, and on our return to Canada we announced we were getting married. I was 20; Brad, 21. It wasn't fashionable to wed that young, and when I told my mother, she said, “Why would you want to do that?” I don't remember how I answered her, but looking back I would say we were in a hurry to formalize our relationship because we felt adrift in our own families. We needed to tether our hearts to something solid -- namely each other.

At our small house wedding during a university reading break later that same year, some of the guests started a pool to bet on how “premature” the baby would be. They waited eight years for that first child. After Kathryn, our son, Adam, arrived three years later in 1991.

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