Love … ahhh the bliss, the red hot flame that changes in color and mood, sometimes rising high and other times burning as a steady ember. Twenty-six years ago I married my husband. It’s hard to believe he was the same age our oldest son is now. And my age still carried the word “teen” on the end of it. We’ve spent our lives together, quite literally, more years with each other than not. We met as friends, but whether it was seeing each other through youthful eyes or something far beyond this world, we had a knowing. It was as if I’d known him for a thousand years. And he told his mother before we were even together that he was going to marry me.

Three months after we were officially a couple he proposed. Two years later we were married. And two years after that, our first son was born. Our twenties were spent working, working, working, me in college, working, being wife and mother; him working days and nights, being husband and father. We struggled and fought and loved each other in that raw and passionate way young adults do.

Then another baby came, the slighter calm of our thirties took over. We had overcome huge obstacles in life, with still more to come; we strove in our own personal growth, in understanding who each of us desired to be in the world, in letting go of patterns that didn’t serve us; our first child became a teenager with new struggles to push and pull at us as parents; we tripped and fumbled, striving to do the right things, and the lessons added new dimensions to our love.

Now, deep into our forties, our children no longer children, our love stronger for all its known, we dwell in the marital years of silver, moving toward those golden years. As young as we started out, we might reach the years of diamonds. We’ve beat the odds, they say. Yes, I guess we have. I also say we’ve known each other for eons, that this life is a blink in our time together, and yet every moment is a special treasure.