Words and Example

If you ask me where most of my daily happiness comes from, I won't hesitate. It comes from my marriage. My wife makes me happy every single day — not in some grand, dramatic way, but in the small, ordinary moments that quietly stack up into a life. My happiness doesn't depend on her. But so much of it springs from her anyway, the way a garden doesn't depend on rain but blooms so much brighter because of it.

Marriage is a long journey — longer than any of us understand on the day we say "I do." Here's the truth: I've been married to four different women. Thank goodness they all happen to be my wife.

She is not the woman I married. She wasn't even the same woman twenty years ago. And that's not a complaint — that's the whole point. People change. I have changed more times than I can count, and I'm sure at least two of those versions of me were insufferable. My wife has been married to four different men too, and thank goodness, I was every one of them. We didn't stay together by getting lucky once. We got lucky over and over again, on purpose.

That's the part nobody tells you about love that lasts: it's not one decision made at an altar. It's a thousand small decisions, made again and again, often on days when neither of you feels particularly romantic — when someone's left the milk out or forgotten, again, to take out the trash. Love isn't the absence of those days. It's what you choose to do the morning after them.

I believe passing down both the words of wisdom and the living example of how to make love last is one of the most important things a grandparent can ever do. Grandchildren don't just need to hear that love is possible. They need to watch it, up close, over years — to see two imperfect people choose each other again and again, and to understand, deep in their bones, that this is what it looks like when it works.

Because I've also seen what it looks like when it doesn't.

Have you experienced divorce in your life — your own, your parents', someone you love? It can be devastating. It can shake a family down to its foundation, leaving children and grandchildren to carry insecurities and wounds that weren't theirs to begin with. It isn't fatal. People survive it, rebuild, even flourish again. But it takes so much work — work that could have gone into building something instead of repairing something.

So do everything you can to avoid it. Not by pretending your marriage is perfect, but by doing the harder, quieter thing: passing down your hardest-won wisdom to your children and grandchildren about what it actually takes to keep love alive. Tell them the truth — that it's not about finding the right person once, but about becoming the right person again and again, for someone who is doing the very same thing for you.

That, I think, is how love lasts. Not by accident. On purpose.

Write a letter to your grandchildren and help them have a stronger marriage.

(AI Assisted)