Sometimes it's what you say. And sometimes it's how you say it. Today I get to say, "Happy Anniversary" to the greatest DH ever! We are celebrating 28 years together!
Some people have asked how we made it so long (which makes me wonder has it really been a long time or is society so used to throw away marriages that it SEEMS like a long time?) I don't see our marriage as being extraordinary but since some have asked, here is my take, in one word, on our success.
GRAMMAR.
Would you like me to expound? I'd be glad to-anyone ever known me to NOT want to expound??? LOL Anyway back to the grammar lesson. I've thought many times about the marriage vows we took, what the words really meant, what I was promising to do and never forget. And the one word that seemed to have the most meaning in the deal was love. And well, during that ceremony "love" was an easy concept. Who doesn't feel love when they are promising it? But feelings don't last, they're fickle, they come and go. Sometimes they hang around a couple years and sometimes they are in and out like the kids use the screen door in the summertime.
But when I read the instruction manual (in my case, God's Word) He clearly says in John 15:12 "This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you." Well, how can we promise to always feel love? That would be a deal breaker from the get go. Unless you apply a little grammar-change the usage of the love "noun" to a love "verb." That's where we take the ballgame to a whole different playing field. So my vow wasn't to always "feel" love (impossible) but to always "do" love (a commandment) no matter what my DH was "feeling" or "doing."
So far, it's worked for me but here is my disclaimer anyway: This Hoosier Girl is not a professional marriage partner. She's up, she's down, she is plugging away.
The following definitions are taken from http://www.merriam-webster.com
Definition of NOUN
: any member of a class of words that typically can be combined with determiners to serve as the subject of a verb, can be interpreted as singular or plural, can be replaced with a pronoun, and refer to an entity, quality, state, action, or concept
Definition of VERB
: a word that characteristically is the grammatical center of a predicate and expresses an act, occurrence, or mode of being, that in various languages is inflected for agreement with the subject, for tense, for voice, for mood, or for aspect, and that typically has rather full descriptive meaning and characterizing quality but is sometimes nearly devoid of these especially when used as an auxiliary or linking verb
