The Florence To Your Stanley

I'll never forget the day I met the guy who would change my life forever.

It was a few days before Christmas in the year 2000. I was sixteen-years-old and idly walking around the mall Christmas shopping for my friends when I came across a store that I had never been in before. I probably would have kept walking, but displayed in the window were little plastic reindeer that released small, round chocolate candies from their rear ends; "pooping reindeer", the perfect gift for one of my best friends who had the best sense of humor out of anyone I knew (and still does!). When I walked in the door, I found myself face-to-face with my future husband and father of my children, smiling his giant, 1,000 watt smile at me and asking me if I needed help finding anything.

Suddenly I could not force the words "pooping reindeer" to come out of my mouth.  

Instead I asked for something safe and non-offensive and stood talking to him for as long as I could before he had to resume working (and then bought my pooping reindeer elsewhere. Oddly enough, they turned out to be everywhere that year). After that, the store where he worked wound up closing and I thought I'd never see that random, charming guy again. Thankfully I was wrong. It took two years, but we did wind up meeting again: When he hired me to work for him. Not exactly the way I was hoping things would go originally, but it wound up being the best-case-scenario. We worked together and became really good friends for two years before we dated. During that time, I dated other guys, but always found myself comparing them to Josh and they all fell short. He was the guy I could never get out of my head. It wasn't because he was funny, intelligent, or cute (even though he's all of those things) but because at the heart of it all, he was such a good guy. It was impossible not to fall madly in love with him.

By now you're probably wondering what this story has to do with the title of this blog.

Five years ago today, I married that random, charming guy from the mall in the world's most imperfectly perfect wedding. While five years feels like a long time to us, I realize that we're only just beginning, thanks to a couple of new friends of mine. Their names are Stanley and Florence, they're in their mid-eighties and they've been married for sixty-five years. I met them in my history class, when they shocked all of us in the class by enrolling in a 300-level class for the fun of it, despite both having multiple degrees. Every day they shuffle in together, and Stanley helps Florence out of her coat and pulls her chair out for her. They sit, with their heads bent together, talking animatedly to each other until class starts. Whenever one answers a question correctly, the other smiles and gently pats the speaker's hand. It's hard not to watch them. They fascinate everyone in my class.

One day before class I asked Florence what the secret to their sixty-five year marriage was and her answer surprised me. She smiled and gestured around our small, cramped classroom and said "This! The second your mind dies, your marriage dies with it".  Not "love", or "honesty", or "sense of humor", but knowledge is what keeps them together. I love that. It's not to say that those other things aren't important, but they found what it is that bonds them and they go with it. In a world with seventy-two day marriages and a new celebrity divorce every five minutes, it's nothing short of inspirational. We should all be so lucky to turn out like Stanley and Florence.

No relationship is perfect, and our relationship is no exception to that rule. We get mad, we fight, but at the end of the day we still love each other. He's still the guy with the great smile who can make me laugh when I feel like crying, whose love and support is truly unconditional, and the best husband and father I could have ever hoped for. I don't know what the next sixty years will bring, but I know who will be by my side for all of it. No matter what happens, I will be the Florence to his Stanley. It's us against the world.

And I'm the luckiest person alive.