26 Years Married: What I've Learned about Love

Twenty-six years of marriage teaches you things no book, podcast, or pre-marital workshop ever could. In this deeply personal post, I look back on my own love story—where it’s thrived, where it’s struggled, and why the light has always outweighed the dark. I’m sharing the truths, the lessons, and the small-but-mighty habits that have carried my wife and me through more than a quarter century together. If you’re engaged, newly married, or decades in, there’s something here for you.

December 18, 2025

No marriage thrives on autopilot. The couples who last are the ones who stay awake at the wheel. 

I've been thinking a lot about love this week: what it is, where it comes from, and how it is valued. The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another person with whom love grows in depth, beauty, and joy with each passing year. The continued love story between two people is the greatest gift a couple can share with one another. It is not to be taken for granted, and it should never be assumed that finding true love is guaranteed. It cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life.

With that in mind, I was awake all night last night, trying to put into words the love I have in my heart for my wife as today begins our 26th year together. Trying to detail how thankful I am for her and how much I appreciate and value her is no easy task. Almost every year that we have been together has been better than the one before, and it is almost impossible for me to imagine how I could ever love her more than I do at this moment, yet I know tomorrow I will love her more. Every second of every day of every year, she has graced my life. She has been a blessing to me from the day I met her, and she has been my every dream come true. On this special day, I would like to let go of all my hesitations, inhibitions, and insecurities. I want to make it perfectly clear how madly I am in love with her. I want to shout it from the rooftops of the world. They say as time goes by the love between couples can fade away. But with her, my love continues growing stronger. 

It is true that we have had our moments in the dark—some so pitch black that we could not see our hands before our eyes—but we have had so many more moments in the light. Bright, radiant, blinding light. We have worked on our life together for the better and we have, I think, been mostly successful. So, really, how could I love her more? As I tell her every day, the answer is timely. She needs only to ask me tomorrow, and then I will tell her.

Love is not a single promise made once. It’s a thousand quiet promises honored in the days that follow. 

I have always been a romantic, and I am not embarrassed to admit that I get incredibly sentimental. If you come close to the DJ booth, you will often find me tearing up during the first dance. The love between a bride and her groom is often so palpable that I am overcome with emotion. I just can't help myself. 

At every wedding I DJ, I watch the couples closely, looking for their “tells”—watching their mannerisms, their gestures, their treatment of one another—to guess whether or not they will make it.  As a romantic, I want every couple to succeed in their marriage. I really do believe in the power of love, and my investment in every couple I marry as an officiant and every couple whose dance floor I fill does not end when I tear down my equipment at reception's end. I regularly check in with couples who hired me for their weddings. I have become friends with most, and I want each and every one of them to have their happily ever after. Like my wife and me, I want them to make it twenty-six years. And then, I want them to make it twenty-six years more.

It seems that everyone has a theory about marriage. Some believe lasting love is built on communication. Others insist it is trust. Others point to shared interests, shared values, date nights, counseling, romance, sacrifice, compromise, faith, friendship, or any number of other ingredients. Entire industries have been built around explaining why some relationships thrive while others fall apart.

After twenty-six years of marriage, I am not sure I possess any great secret.

What I do have are observations.

Some come from my own marriage. Others come from nearly three decades spent standing a few feet away from couples on one of the most important days of their lives. Every weekend, I watch people promise forever. Every weekend, I witness hope, excitement, vulnerability, nervousness, joy, and love in its purest form. And every weekend, I find myself wondering the same thing:

What allows some couples to continue choosing one another long after the wedding day is over?

After every Anniversary Dance, I bring my microphone to the last couple standing. They are the couple who has been married the longest. I ask their names. I ask how many years they have been together. Then I ask what advice they have for the newlyweds.

It has become a running joke that most husbands answer with the same two words: "Yes, dear."

The room laughs every time.

And while there is probably more wisdom hidden in that answer than most of us would care to admit, I have always found myself fascinated by something else. Every one of those couples arrived at that dance floor by a different path. They lived through different struggles, different triumphs, different disappointments, different joys, and different circumstances. Yet somehow they all arrived at the same destination.

Over the years, I have spent a great deal of time wondering why.

Today, on the anniversary of my own marriage, I find myself reflecting not on what makes a perfect marriage, but on what has allowed my wife and me to continue building a life together for twenty-six years despite all of our differences, flaws, mistakes, challenges, and imperfections.

One thing I have learned about marriage is that compatibility is often misunderstood. When people talk about compatibility, they usually mean finding someone who is like them. Someone who shares their habits, their personality, their interests, and their outlook on life. We are told that opposites attract, but we are also told that common interests are the foundation of lasting relationships. The truth, at least in my experience, is considerably more complicated than either of those ideas. After twenty-six years of marriage, I am not convinced that compatibility has much to do with sameness at all. In fact, some of the greatest strengths in my marriage have come from the very differences that occasionally drive us crazy.

Now, to be fair, my wife and I do share many of the things that matter most. We are both huge music fans, even if she can never remember the name of the artist, the title of the song, or sometimes both simultaneously. We love stories. We love books. We love movies. We are both unapologetic members of various fandom communities. We can spend hours discussing Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, anime, horror films, mythology, folklore, religion, philosophy, politics, and the world around us. We are both curious people who enjoy learning, and we generally arrive at the same conclusions about most of life's biggest questions. In many ways, the foundation beneath our marriage is remarkably similar.

The day-to-day reality of living together, however, is an entirely different story.

I am an extrovert. She is an introvert. I make my living standing in front of crowds speaking into microphones while she openly admits that she does not "people" particularly well. I am the planner in the relationship. Calling me organized would be far too generous, but once I become interested in something, I will obsessively research every detail. Vacations become military campaigns complete with itineraries, backup plans, alternative routes, and contingency plans for the contingency plans. Gail has referred to me as Clark Griswold more than once, and she is not wrong. Meanwhile, she is perfectly content figuring things out as they happen. If I am looking six months ahead, she is looking at today.

We are equally different when it comes to money. I collect things. Far too many things. Funko Pops, brewery tin tackers, Lord of the Rings movie memorabilia, Disney pins, books, shot glasses, T-shirts, and all things Jessica Rabbit. My vinyl record collection can no longer be neatly contained because it has grown so large. And I have enough random interests to fill a warehouse. I have season tickets to the Cleveland Guardians. I have season passes to Cedar Point. Gail, meanwhile, hates spending money. On anything. She worries about the future in ways I simply do not. I am generally optimistic to a fault. I tend to believe that everything will somehow work itself out. Gail is not pessimistic, but she is realistic in ways I often fail to be. Looking back, I understand why. Her childhood taught her lessons mine never did. While I grew up in a home where my parents remained married until death separated them, Gail spent years navigating divorces, blended families, changing households, uncertainty, and instability. She learned early that life does not always go according to plan. I learned that it usually would. Neither perspective is entirely right. Neither perspective is entirely wrong.

Even our relationship with the outside world could not be more different. If I spend more than twenty-four hours indoors, I begin climbing the walls. During the pandemic, one of us handled quarantine remarkably well while the other nearly lost his mind. I will leave it to you to decide which was which. Gail could happily spend an entire weekend at home and consider it time well spent. I am always searching for the next road trip, the next adventure, the next experience, or simply the next excuse to leave the house. She recharges in solitude. I recharge around people. By every conventional measure, we should probably drive one another insane.

And yet somehow, it works.

That does not mean our differences never create friction. They absolutely do. Sometimes our differences complement one another beautifully. Sometimes they annoy the hell out of us. Most of the time, they do a little of both. But over the years I have come to appreciate the fact that neither of us sees the world exactly as it is. We see it through the lens of our experiences. My optimism has value. So does her caution. My spontaneity has value. So does her practicality. My tendency to dream has value. So does her ability to keep both feet planted firmly on the ground. Perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts marriage offers. It allows us to borrow another person's perspective. It challenges our assumptions. It forces us to consider possibilities we might otherwise miss. And after twenty-six years together, I have come to believe that compatibility is not the absence of differences. Compatibility is finding someone whose differences make your life larger rather than smaller.

The best love stories aren’t written in grand gestures; 

they’re written in grocery lists, inside jokes, and shared blankets.

Of course, appreciating another person's differences and living with them every day are not always the same thing.

There is a reason wedding vows do not stop at love, honor, and cherish. Somewhere in the fine print should probably be a promise to tolerate. Not merely the big things, but the thousands of tiny things that reveal themselves only after years of sharing a life with another person. Every marriage eventually reaches the point where the mystery disappears and reality moves in. You discover how the other person handles stress. You discover their habits, their quirks, their blind spots, and all the little things that nobody mentions during the dating phase because they seem too insignificant to matter. Then one day you realize they matter quite a bit.

My wife and I both have flaws. Shocking, I know. We can both be sarcastic. We can both be passive-aggressive. We occasionally communicate in exactly the way every relationship expert tells you not to communicate. There are moments when I am absolutely convinced that I am being perfectly reasonable and Gail is not. There are moments when Gail is absolutely convinced of the exact opposite. Neither of us is correct nearly as often as we think we are. The funny thing is that marriage has not eliminated any of those tendencies. Twenty-six years together has not transformed either of us into enlightened relationship gurus floating above the petty frustrations of everyday life. If anything, marriage has made us more aware of our shortcomings because there is no one better equipped to identify them than the person who has lived beside you for a quarter century. My wife knows every flaw I possess. I know every flaw she possesses. We have spent twenty-six years collecting evidence.

Some of those flaws have remained remarkably consistent over the years. Others have evolved with the times.

When Gail and I first met, neither of us carried a tiny glowing rectangle capable of demanding our attention every thirty seconds. There were no smartphones. No social media feeds. No endless notifications competing for our focus. If we wanted to spend time together, we spent time together. If we wanted to have a conversation, we had one. Today, like most couples, we have to be intentional about presence, and neither of us has mastered that art.

One of the ongoing lessons in our marriage is learning that distractions come in many forms. Gail disappears into content. I disappear into responsibilities. She can spend an evening watching reels, listening to podcasts, reading Reddit threads, and following one story after another. I can spend the same evening answering inquiries, writing blog posts, responding to brides, updating timelines, working on the website, or tackling some project that suddenly feels urgent. On the surface, those things seem entirely different. One appears recreational. The other appears productive. Yet both are capable of accomplishing the same thing. Both can pull our attention away from the person sitting beside us.

The funny thing is that neither of us is actually choosing a screen over the other person. If Gail asked me to close the laptop and spend time together, I would. If I asked Gail to put down her phone and watch a movie, take a walk, or simply sit and talk, she would. The problem is that we do not always use our words. Too often, we each wait for the other to initiate. She assumes I am busy. I assume she is occupied. She scrolls. I work. Before long, an hour has passed and both of us have quietly surrendered time we would probably have preferred spending together.

One of the things marriage has taught me is that people are remarkably poor mind readers. We spend years learning another person, yet we still occasionally expect them to know what we want without being told. We assume they know we want company. We assume they know we would like to talk. We assume they know we would rather spend time together than continue doing whatever currently has our attention. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. The older I get, the more convinced I become that many relationship problems begin not with conflict but with silence. Not because two people are angry with one another, but because they are waiting for the other person to speak first.

In the end, I think presence is one of the purest expressions of love. Not gifts. Not flowers. Not grand gestures. Attention. To put down the phone. To close the laptop. To stop scrolling. To ask another question. To remain engaged in a conversation long after it would be easier to drift elsewhere. Those things seem small, but they are not. Every meaningful relationship is built one conversation at a time, and every distraction quietly steals a few of those conversations away.

Twenty-six years later, this remains one of the lessons we continue learning. Not because we love one another any less. Not because we are bad at marriage. Simply because being fully present is harder than it sounds. We are better at it than we once were. Not perfect. Better. And perhaps that is the most realistic goal any marriage can have. Not perfection. Progress. Not arriving. Continuing. Not mastering the art of loving another person, but remaining willing to keep learning it.

Romance is not flowers, poetry, or candlelight. Romance is knowing another person well enough to make them feel seen.

Romance has always come more naturally to me than it has to Gail.

My wife frequently jokes that I am the woman in the marriage.

She is not entirely wrong.

I am the one who gets sentimental. I am the one who tears up during first dances. I am the one who believes every love story deserves a soundtrack. I am a poet. I believe words matter. I believe symbols matter. I believe there is something beautiful about finding a unique way to tell another person how much they mean to you. Gail appreciates those things, but she does not necessarily seek them out. She has always been far more practical than I am. If left to my own devices, I would happily spend an afternoon crafting some elaborate surprise that only makes sense after three paragraphs of explanation. Gail would simply like to know where we're going for dinner.

Over the years, I have learned that there is a difference between romance and effectiveness.

One Valentine's Day, I spent more than two hundred dollars creating a giant love letter entirely out of candy bars. Every candy was selected for a reason. Every piece helped tell part of our story. It took days to assemble. It was ridiculous. It was excessive. It was completely unnecessary. Naturally, she loved it. Another year, I gave her a golden apple inscribed in Ancient Greek with the words "To the Fairest." Literature nerds will recognize it as the apple of discord from Greek mythology, the gift that ultimately led Paris to choose Aphrodite over Hera and Athena. The symbolism was not lost on her. As a former English teacher, I probably spent far more time thinking about the mythology behind the gift than any sane person should have. Yet for reasons I still do not entirely understand, that one worked, too.

Apparently my success rate improves dramatically whenever mythology or sugar is involved.

The truth is that those examples probably paint a somewhat misleading picture.

My batting average is nowhere near that impressive.

For every gesture that lands exactly as intended, there are countless others that earn a smile, a thank you, and little else. Gail appreciates the effort. She always has. But she has never been particularly susceptible to romance for romance's sake. She is not the sort of person who swoons. She is not impressed by spectacle. She is not easily won over by sentimentality alone. That just isn't her love language.

The truth is that it took me a long time to realize that loving someone and making them feel loved are not necessarily the same thing.

When we are young, I think most of us assume that the ways we naturally express love will also be the ways our partner naturally receives it. That seems reasonable enough. If something makes us feel appreciated, surely it will make them feel appreciated as well. If something makes us feel cherished, surely it will make them feel cherished. But people are rarely that simple.

I am a words person. I always have been. I write. I tell stories. I search for symbolism. I attach meaning to objects, songs, places, and moments. When I love someone, my instinct is to tell them. To show them. To create something. To make the feeling visible.

Gail is different.

That is not to say she does not appreciate those things. She does. But what has always mattered most to her is consistency. Reliability. Follow-through. Showing up. Doing what needs to be done. If I tell her I love her, she appreciates hearing it. If I help carry the burden when life becomes difficult, she feels it. If I quietly take something off her plate without being asked, she notices. If I keep my word, she remembers.

Looking back, I think some of the most important lessons in our marriage came from learning that distinction.

For years, I was speaking love in my language and assuming she was hearing it exactly as I intended. Sometimes she was. Sometimes she wasn't. The same was true in reverse. There were moments when I failed to recognize the countless ways she was expressing love because she was not expressing it the way I would have.

That realization changes things.

It forces you to stop asking, "How do I want to be loved?" and start asking, "How does this person experience love?" Those are not the same question.

And perhaps that is one of the great ongoing projects of marriage.

Not simply loving another person, but learning how that particular person needs to be loved.

Love survives not because two people never change, but because they never stop learning who the other person is becoming.

There is another lesson marriage taught me, and unlike many of the others, I did not learn this one gracefully.

I learned it the hard way.

One of the most important realizations of my married life was discovering that loving someone is not the same as understanding what they are going through. That may sound obvious now, but for a long time I did not fully appreciate the distinction. When the person you love is struggling, your instinct is to help. You want to make things better. You want to find the right words, offer the right advice, and somehow ease whatever burden they happen to be carrying. That instinct comes from a place of love. The problem is that love does not automatically grant understanding.

There were times during our marriage when Gail was carrying things I could see but did not fully comprehend. From my perspective, those burdens often appeared manageable. I looked at them the way I look at most challenges in life: identify the problem, formulate a plan, and move forward. It is a mindset that has served me well in many areas of life. It just did not serve me particularly well here. What took me far too long to understand was that not every struggle responds to logic, optimism, determination, or a carefully constructed plan. Some experiences are far more complicated than they appear from the outside, especially when you are standing on the outside looking in.

That realization was difficult for me because I am, by nature, a fixer. I like solutions. I like progress. I like movement. When something is broken, I want to repair it. When someone is hurting, I want to help. For years, I assumed those impulses made me supportive. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they did not. Sometimes what Gail needed most was not advice, encouragement, or another proposed solution. Sometimes she simply needed patience. Sometimes she needed understanding. Sometimes she needed the freedom to feel whatever she was feeling without someone immediately trying to change it.

Marriage has a way of humbling you like that.

Over time, I began to understand that my role was not to carry every burden or win every battle. It was to listen more carefully. To pay closer attention. To become comfortable admitting that I did not always understand what she was experiencing while still making certain she never had to experience it alone. That sounds simple enough when written on a page. In practice, it took me years to learn.

Perhaps that is because learning another person never really ends.

Just when you think you understand someone completely, life reveals another layer. A new challenge appears. A new fear emerges. A new season begins. The person standing beside you remains the same person you have always loved, yet there is suddenly something new to understand about them. Something new to learn. Something new to navigate together.

And maybe that is one of the most beautiful things about marriage.

Twenty-six years later, I am still learning my wife.

I hope I always am.

The years have changed nearly everything about our lives, but not who I want beside me while living them.

Of course, all of this reflection risks making our marriage sound far more sophisticated than it actually is.

The truth is that Gail and I are still just two imperfect people stumbling our way through life together.

I am fifty-three years old and possess the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old. My mind insists that I am somewhere in my thirties. My body, meanwhile, appears to have died during the Civil War. I tell terrible dad jokes. I laugh at things that probably should not be funny. If I encounter a pile of leaves, there is a very real possibility I am going to jump into it. If I come across a sprinkler on a hot day, common sense immediately abandons me. Not a day goes by that I do not say or do something that causes Gail to roll her eyes and question at least one of the life choices that led her to marrying me.

To be fair, she gives me plenty to work with as well.

Gail is a world-class complainer.

I say that with love because she would readily admit it herself.

Over the years, our sons and I have developed a silent language that occasionally emerges when we are dining out. We all know the signs. Sometimes the food is too cold. Sometimes the music is too loud. Sometimes the service is too slow. Sometimes the complaint is entirely justified. Sometimes it is merely inevitable. Whatever the case may be, Joel, Ben, and I can usually sense it coming several minutes before it arrives. A glance is exchanged across the table. An eyebrow is raised. No words are necessary. Twenty-six years together has made us fluent.

Of course, Gail has spent twenty-six years studying me as well.

That is considerably more dangerous.

She knows every story before I tell it. She knows every punchline before I reach it. She knows exactly which subjects will send me down a twenty-minute tangent and which hobbies are about to become temporary obsessions. She has watched me collect interests, projects, books, records, movies, and enough assorted curiosities to suggest that I have never fully mastered the concept of moderation. She has endured my puns, tolerated my enthusiasm, and listened patiently as I explained countless things that probably required no explanation whatsoever.

The funny thing is that all of these quirks, habits, and peculiarities eventually become part of the story. The eye rolls become jokes. The complaints become family lore. The little things that once seemed noteworthy become so familiar that it is difficult to imagine life without them. At some point, another person's imperfections stop feeling like interruptions and start feeling like landmarks.

I need to stop here for a moment because reading this back, I realize I may have unintentionally painted a misleading picture. After all this talk of differences, flaws, eye rolls, complaints, misunderstandings, and lessons learned, a reader could be forgiven for concluding that Gail and I have simply become very good at tolerating one another. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that we genuinely enjoy being together. We always have. The differences make for good stories, but they are not the foundation of our marriage. The foundation is friendship.

We laugh every day.

Not at one another. With one another.

That distinction matters.

Some of my favorite moments in our marriage have not been anniversaries, vacations, holidays, or major life events. They have been ordinary evenings spent laughing so hard that neither of us could finish a sentence. They have been private jokes that would make absolutely no sense to anyone else. They have been conversations that wandered into absurd territory simply because neither of us was willing to let the other have the last word. Twenty-six years later, she can still make me laugh. Twenty-six years later, I can still make her laugh.

For all the discussion of differences throughout this blog post, there is something equally important that deserves to be said. Whenever we intentionally make time for one another, we find our rhythm again. We always do. The distractions disappear. The stress of work disappears. The endless obligations of adult life fade into the background. Whether we are talking, traveling, watching a movie, sharing a meal, attending a concert, or simply sitting together at home, there is a sense of partnership that remains remarkably constant.

We are at our best when we are together.

And perhaps that is the simplest explanation for everything I have written so far.

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

Today, my wife and I are twenty-six years married. How have we remained deeply intertwined and (mostly) living out the dreams we would speak of back in the day, before marriage, talking on AOL instant messaging until the wee hours of the morning?

I don’t honestly know. 

It just seems to me that it works.

Each and every day of our marriage has brought something new, and we have embraced it together. Even those days we didn’t see eye to eye—those days we would love to forget and give anything to take back—they happened, and here we still are. It seems to me that we simply grew together, built a life together, and chose—again and again—for our lives to be together and never apart.

In my defense, I’ve never needed a reason, I’ve never sought a reason, nor have I ever wanted a reason why, twenty-six years later, my wife and I are still here living out our lives together. One thing is for sure, though. I can’t imagine being anywhere else in life than with her. She challenges me, grounds me, encourages me, frustrates me, humbles me, inspires me, and fulfills me. She makes me a better man than I ever would have become on my own. And I am looking forward to the next twenty-six years of raw and unfiltered adventures, experiences, and life as we live it: every eye roll, every conversation, every inside joke, every difficult season, every ordinary Tuesday, and every moment in between.

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