Tomorrow is my 33rd wedding anniversary. Ray and I have somehow managed to be married longer even than my own parents, who made it to 32 years before my dad passed away. That is a strange experience for me – to be married longer than my parents who I always thought had a respectably long marriage.
Ray and I have defied the odds in our marriage. I know that many people were skeptical about how long we would make it together. I actually had several people tell me just before and immediately after we married that they thought we were not the best match. I have forgiven those people, but have never forgotten their insensitivity. Still, I am five years older than Ray and he did look like he was about fifteen when we married (he was the ripe old age of 22) so I can understand how a few people might have thought this was an odd coupling. However, they just didn’t know Ray the way I did.
From the moment I met Ray – and I had no idea then that we would have any romantic future since he was 19 and I was 24 and had a boyfriend – I knew that I had met someone extremely unique. We met on a psychiatric unit where I was a brand-new psychotherapist and he was a brand-new orderly, and he was so funny that he could make me laugh to the point that tears rolled down my cheeks. I remember sitting in a staff meeting next to him one day and hearing his running commentary half under his breath on what was being said by those in charge. I had never heard anything so irreverent or hilariously funny in my life. I knew then that I was dealing with someone cut from a completely different cloth than I was – Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. Here was someone who conveyed through razor-sharp wit his unwillingness to blindly accept the status quo. I had no idea who this person was, but I did know that I instantly liked him.
Fast forward two years of friendship and it was time for me to leave and move to Arkansas to live closer to my long-term boyfriend there. Ray and I had never so much as hugged one another in anything but the friendliest of ways. I knew that day when I gave him one last platonic hug good-bye that I loved him. I didn’t know then that it was LOVE. I just knew that I loved this fellow who was such a good friend to me, and who was such a funny and discerning human being. Then off I went to live 8 hours away in the “Natural” state of Arkansas.
Another year passed and after a few ups and downs, my boyfriend and I ended our relationship. I continued to work as a mental health clinician and I began dating a few fellows. I was, after all, now 27 and a fairly decent catch in that town of Mountain View with all of its 1800 occupants. It wasn’t until I saw Ray again a few months later that we had what I think of now as the “Come to Jesus” moment.
I had returned to Texas to see my mother and went over to visit at the hospital. Ray was working and invited me to come to his house after he got off for the night. I went over and we sat and talked for hours – about everything that had happened over the time I had been away. Finally, he looked at me and said, “This is the first time we’ve been together that you haven’t been with someone else, and you should know that I’ve waited all of this time for you.”
I was a little surprised at his forthright approach, but a mutual friend of ours on the psychiatric unit had told me a few months before that Ray had told her that he missed me.
“I need to know where we’re going from here,” he said. “If we don’t come up with a plan, than I’m done waiting for you.”
I knew right then that I couldn’t play with Ray’s heart. He was so vulnerable sitting there before me, so utterly transparent, that I felt an extreme sense of responsibility to be as honest and sincere as I could be about my feelings. I knew that whatever I said, there would be no going back. My response: “I guess we could hug.”
We were married three months later in Mountain View, Arkansas on June 7th of 1980, one of the hottest years on record. It was already 95 degrees at 10 am when we said, “I do” in the public park in front of a judge and 14 witnesses.
I now know that everything I knew about Ray at that time sums him up almost completely. He is irreverent, funny, smart, iconoclastic, and one of the most sincere and transparent people I have ever known. He has also remained my closest friend over all of these years. I can’t say that our marriage has been easy. Those first years we fought so hard and so often that we finally just wore ourselves out with fighting. We also each brought in enough baggage to fill a train station and it’s taken years to unpack those bags one by one and toss out all the hurt, pain, and pure junk that we managed to gather early in our lives.
But I must say that being married to Ray has never for one day been boring. That fellow knows how to keep life hopping.
He is also one of the best fathers that a child could hope for: funny, loving, hard-working and generous. That alone makes me love him very much.
So, I am happy that I have had the opportunity to spend 33 years with my husband. He has pushed me into expressing my feelings, pulled me into experiencing more of life, and given me the freedom to figure out who, what and how I am and to love me no matter what.
Who could ask for more than that?
I also thinks he’s more handsome now than ever. That is also a nice plus.
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