The One Word That Helped Me Stay Happily Married for Over 40 Years

It helps when you marry a Saint, and destiny is on your side

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Call it divine intervention, but I won the heart of my college sweetheart in the Spring of 1983. I call it a miracle, and everyone who knows my wife and me will tell you she’s a Saint for putting up with me.

I first saw Janice from a distance during Freshman year at a small private college in central Ohio. She walked into the student dining area while I was seated with my numbnut buddies, her long, straight blonde hair falling at the lower-middle part of her athletic back. Just over five feet tall.

She stopped me in my tracks from across the room. I locked eyes with her for an instant before my shyness jerked my head down to stare at my shoes, hoping none of my buddies noticed. They did, relentlessly berating me for doing what was natural, staring at a beautiful girl. Little did they know what the future would hold.

The student body was small enough that I regularly ran into Janice and her girlfriends. Before long, I started dating a close friend of hers, which was a big deal for me. I’d never had a girlfriend before. No high school prom, either, which was fine, because talking to girls terrified me more than crossing the thin ice covering the local lakes in early Winter.

As destiny would have it, my girlfriend and I broke up, and I went to Janice to lament. Not to impress her. Not with any agenda. To tell her how sad I was about losing my girlfriend. In retrospect, that boyish vulnerability had appeal. Janice felt sorry for me. We started hanging out as friends. A few weeks later, I mustered the courage to ask her on a date: a long back-road bicycle ride in late Spring.

From that first date on, I vowed to marry Janice. And I did. I courted her long-distance with handwritten love notes she still keeps in one of her keepsake boxes, buried on the floor of the walk-in closet.

I got a decent job shortly after graduating, and together we made a fast plan. Within two years of graduation, we married in Janice’s hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia.

We were kids. We invited all our high school and college friends. Our parents invited extended family and friends. It was surreal — 250 people, maybe more. We partied hard the way college kids do. Stayed up late. The wedding went without a hitch.

As I was getting into the old Rolls-Royce we’d rented to go from the ceremony to the reception, my brother-in-law put his arm around me.

“Congratulations, Cliff. Welcome to the family. Would you like to know the most important word for staying happily married a long time?”

“Sure.”

“Compromise.”

“Compromise?”

“Yes. Be willing to compromise, because you’re going to learn to live with another person for the rest of your life.”

“Rest of my life?”

“Yeah. I know. It sounds scary. But you’ll be okay. Just remember to compromise.”

I never forgot that advice.

What I didn’t know, standing beside that Rolls-Royce in my rented tuxedo, was that one word would quietly dismantle the most stubborn version of me. The self-centered, dominant, my-way-or-the-highway guy who walked into that marriage thinking love was mostly about feeling good. I had no idea what I was actually signing up for.

Neither did Janice, God bless her.

The early years were an education. Two people raised in different households, with different rhythms, different tolerances, different definitions of clean, quiet, and kind, learning to share one life.

The conversion from youthful infatuation and lust to lasting love took its natural course, quickly. Love doesn’t announce itself. It happens the way light changes in late afternoon, gradually, then all at once, and suddenly you realize the room looks completely different.

Compromise was the mechanism. But what it produced was something I didn’t have a word for back then.

Unity.

Not the greeting-card version. Not two people tolerating each other’s quirks under the same roof for four decades. I mean the real thing, the kind where you stop experiencing yourself as a separate agenda and start moving through the world as something closer to one. Janice and I became that. Slowly. Imperfectly. With plenty of friction along the way. But we became that.

I had to soften. There’s no polite way to say it. The self-centered man who climbed into that Rolls-Royce had to be worn down and rebuilt, and marriage, specifically, marriage to Janice, did that work on me. I became more chill. More compassionate. More willing to find the middle way and stay there. Less interested in winning an argument than in keeping the peace I’d finally learned to value. That transformation didn’t come from a book or a seminar. It came from forty years of choosing her, and being chosen back, and slowly becoming the kind of man worthy of both.

A lot of guys win the proverbial lottery. They make gazillions, collect fancy houses and cars, and stack wealth on paper. I understand the appeal. But I’ve been wealthy in ways that don’t show up on a balance sheet, my health, my marriage, my sons, thirty years of building something on my own terms, two decades of coaching and consulting executives and entrepreneurs, mentoring kids through Junior Achievement who reminded me why any of it matters. And now, soon-to-be four grandchildren.

None of that happens without Janice. None of it happens without compromise, not as surrender, but as the daily decision to put the marriage above the ego.

To choose unity over being right. What a concept. If I needed to be right all the time, I’d be single. Then, I’d be miserable, and perhaps living in a small tent down by the Salt River.

My brother-in-law pulled me aside for maybe thirty seconds beside a rented car outside a wedding reception. He didn’t give me a speech. He gave me a word.

That word became the greatest achievement of my life. Not a business I built. Not a client I helped turn around. Not an article or a book or anything I created with my hands or my mind. The greatest thing I ever did was learn to compromise well enough, and long enough, that two people became one.

Janice already knew how to do that. She’s been doing it since that bicycle ride in late Spring.

I told you. She’s a Saint.

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❤️❤️❤️ Here’s a great story about romance over time from Bonnie Lieberman

✍ — Edited and Published by Dr. Gabriella Korosi, at Dancing Elephants Press. Click here for submission guidelines.