From Shucking Corn to Lasting Love

“I grew up on a farm and I was expected to pitch in,” Fred said as he crumpled his napkin and carefully set it on his cleaned-off paper plate. “That’s not the way it is for my grandchildren. Their days are filled will baseball, football, and soccer – nothing to do with work. And that’s what scares me; there’s no commitment to work.”

Fred was tall, lean, topped off with remarkably plush white hair, and was quick to laugh. Despite being retired for 16 years, there was nothing frail about him, and even the sounds of the county fair in the background were drowned away by his deep, clear voice.  

“It’s work making a marriage a success,” he said. “When people make a commitment, you may need to put some work in to keep it going. Maybe working on a farm when I grew up made working on something seem normal.”

Cathy, Fred’s wife for more than 56 years, walked up to the picnic table. Her eyes were bright, lively, and her smile made her seem 20 years younger. She had just finished doing watercolors en plein air and had come to the fairgrounds to find Fred. “For us, having our own interests that we do without the other really works,” he said.

The concept of a marriage being work is common enough, but I’ve never heard of someone equating a value of actual physical work -- like the work Fred may have done on the farm as a boy -- with the determination needed to “work” on a marriage. The leap from shucking corn to working on a long-lasting marriage was a short one for Fred.

Fred came from the generation when marriages spanned decades regardless of the actual happiness of either individual. Fred’s generous laugh, Cathy’s deeply etched laugh lines by her eyes and lips, and their genuine affection towards each other demonstrated that whatever work they put into the marriage actually worked. God bless the milking of cows at day break.

We celebrate the notion of romantic love, a concept that’s relatively new since for thousands of years people married more out of a sense of pragmatism rather than for starry-eyed bliss. For most couples, romantic love lasts only a handful of years before the butterflies in your stomach stop fluttering, only to be replaced by a few ladybugs, fireflies, and the occasional stinkbug.   

This is normal.

Ideally, you'll grow to relax into the other person and feel safe, content, and loved.  In the perfect world, maintaining that connection shouldn't feel like work, but in reality, we all have needs we'd like our significant others to meet.  For many, meeting the needs of our spouses can eventually begin to feel like work.

An example of working to meet your spouse's need is saying "I love you" with sincerity. For many married men I know, saying "I love you" to their wives of many years is uncomfortable, and at best, these guys say it with the same practiced reflex of saying "bless you" after a sneeze. For these men, genuinely saying "I love you" is work -- strenuous work --  and they'd undoubtedly prefer to stack hundreds of bales of hay rather than reveal any sense of emotional vulnerability.

It would be fantastic if what worked for the couple in their mid-twenties also worked for them in their thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond. But in reality, people change as experiences continue to shape the two of you into new people.  It's critical to understand that this will happen to every couple -- even the two of you. The key thing is to work on maintaining a strong connection with each other so that you evolve together.

It's not romantic to believe true love requires any amount of work, but all the greatest endeavors in life do require focused effort. Perhaps one day pre-marital counseling will involve a week of feeding pigs, reaping a harvest, and mucking out horse stalls, so that couples understand the value of working at something together. The more you work physically, the tougher your hands become, but the more you work at love, the less calloused your heart becomes.

As I watched Fred and Cathy walk toward the midway, still smiling after 56 years of marriage,  it was hard to argue with the value of a little hard work.