Today is the 45th Anniversary for wife Joan and me. Tomorrow is Father’s Day, which was mentioned in today’s podcast from Morning Wire. They mentioned the difficulty of those growing up without a father in the house, especially when it comes to later maintaining a marriage and family. I come from a broken home. So does Joan. We talked about that during college as we had heard the statistics of what sounded like our marriage would be doomed. And yet, here we are. I attribute our 45yr marriage success to three main things.
We were committed Christians and stayed active in the church, raising our family in the church.
Because we both experienced parents divorcing and the devastating effects that has on the children, we were committed to never letting that happen to our children. We were both at nearly every swim meet, baseball game, theater performance and concerts. There were a few times where we had to split because both boys would have something going on at the same time and sometimes in different cities. But we never just sent them off. We were there.
That we spent so much time working together in small office environments, the types of temptations that seem to creep into a lot of marriages were never present in ours. Neither of us ever considered anyone else. In our first three years of marriage, we taught at the same school and shared an office. Later, after John left education, we shared a business office for over two decades at QDP Corporation.
And we never let anyone tell us how to raise our children. We left education to start our family. Joan wanted to be a stay at home mom. My freedom of schedule allowed me to be at almost every t-ball, baseball, swim meet, and concert that either of our sons was in. I’ll never say we did everything right, but our sons are both successful in what they are doing. They have always, as have we, self-sufficient.
Are we experts? No. But ours has been a successful family for 45 years.
Here’s to 50 years and beyond.
