Today is my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.  In 1980, Maureen and I were married in a Catholic ceremony at her family’s parish church in Staten Island.  I don’t remember much about the day itself – I was dazed by the weight of the occasion – except for the steamy August weather.  It didn’t rain, but the air was thick with humidity and promise.

    It seems a long time: twenty-five years.  If you had asked me then what we would be now, I would have said (I think) that, yes, we would still be together after twenty-five years, but, looking back from this vantage, I can only laugh at how little I knew then about the twists and turns our lives would take.  A long, strange trip, indeed.

     I do not pretend to any special wisdom about marital bliss.  But, as I think about how it is we have kept our marriage intact and happy and viable for twenty five years, it seems that some combination of duty and luck has kept us going. 

     Duty is not a popular idea in contemporary America: it tends to be overwhelmed by notions of fun and self-interest and frolic in our youth-oriented, celebrity-driven popular culture.  But, beyond the bright lights and front pages, duty is what defines the lives of most Americans. We discover ourselves in our committed actions toward others, most often family members but also neighbors and community groups and ideals larger than ourselves. 

     What is most important about duty, however, is the action part.  Spoken promises are meaningless if not accompanied by behavior that makes commitment concrete.  This is the Confucian idea of ritual: not just the big life-changing moments – weddings, funerals, graduations, etc. – but the daily duties of family life.  Getting up and making breakfast, doing the laundry (this is, perhaps my greatest failing!), going into work, taking time to help with the kid’s homework, washing the dishes (this I am much better at!).  The seemingly menial chores of everyday life are, in fact, the stage upon which we perform our social roles and responsibilities.   And it is at this level that Maureen and I have kept things together.

      Neither of us is particularly romantic.  We do not spend much time on birthdays or celebrations.  Maybe we should do more of that stuff; but what we do do is turn to the tasks before us.  Maureen is an eminently practical person.  The old refrain from her parent’s Brooklyn neighborhood still springs from her mouth: "You gotta do, what you’ve gotta do."  She is more active than me and would rather pull weeds in the garden than read the Sunday Book Review.   But she has kept me from becoming a complete sloth.  I have, over the twenty-five years, come to take a certain pride in completing familial tasks: keeping clean the site in Aidan’s belly where his feeding tube runs into his stomach; bringing all of the various elements of a dinner together at the same time; balancing the check book.  This is what Chuang Tzu means when he tell us to "dwell in the ordinary."

      We have also been lucky.  This may seem odd given what appears to be our bad luck with Aidan’s disability.  Of course, I do not see his circumstances as bad luck, just a turn of fate.   Our good fortune centers on our economic circumstances.  We both have good jobs that allow for fairly flexible time and good health insurance.  Increasingly, I am aware of how many other people have to worry about being fired, or losing health care, or putting in more hours on the job: the kinds of pressures that can burst the seams of the strongest marriages.  The academic job market is famously fickle.  And somehow I drifted through it successfully.  Maureen (the more practical one) could find a job just about anywhere as a registered nurse.  My situation, however, has a heavy dose of luck attached to it, and that has helped our marriage a lot.

     So, duty and luck: that is what explains twenty-five years.  And, keeping in mind that Confucian notion of ritual in seemingly small daily behaviors, I will leave you with Mencius.  I would never claim that we live up to the standard of noble-mindedness he is suggesting here, just that this is an ideal for which we strive:

Mencius said: "What makes the noble-minded different is that they keep their hearts whole.  And to do that, they depend on Humanity and Ritual.  Those who practice Humanity love people, and those who observe Ritual honor people.  If you love people that way, people will always love you faithfully.  And if you honor people that way, people will always honor you faithfully."