Last week I received the most meaningful e-mail from a Beyond Blue reader, Mike, who recently lost his wife and was celebrating Thanksgiving without her for the first time. “I lost my girlfriend, wife, and mother of my children,” he wrote. “We had 46 years of marriage which allowed us to glow as a couple and individuals.”
I thanked him for sharing this with me and asked him what advice for marriage he had, since his love and devotion to his wife were so obvious to me, and I feel like an apprentice with only 12 years tucked away.
Here was his reply:

I’m not sure what I can share in a blog at this time, there is a lot of pain. Questions unanswered, a hole inside me, and where do I fit in this adventure. Some suggestions to keep a lover could include: kiss everyday, say “I love you” even when it is not coming from the heart that day, and send flowers often.

And then he shared with me a passage from Joseph Campbell, the late American mythology professor and writer:

The whole thing in marriage is the relationship and yielding – knowing the functions, knowing that each is playing a role in an organism. One of the things I have realized – is that marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. But marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That’s why it’s a sacrament: you give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you’re giving, you’re not giving to the other person: you are giving to the relationship. And if you realize that you are in the relationship just as another person is, then it becomes life building. A life fostering and enriching experience, not an impoverishment because you’re giving to somebody else. . . . The beautiful thing is the growing: each helping the other to flower. We often want to freeze the other person but you can’t have that and love too.