SAGE ADVICE: Anniversary Angst

My sister reminded my wife a few weeks ago that it was our anniversary. I think she said something along the lines of, “What did you all do for your anniversary?”
My wife, who, as had I, had forgotten, probably said something like, “nothing.” I would have made up some fantastic lie and then sworn to it till the day I died. Had she asked me, I would have told her we flew to Italy, bought an estate and gave the kids to a needy family down the street. Answers like that are the reason no one in my family ever asks me any questions.
To be fair, I didn’t completely forget that I’d gotten married. I knew it was sometime in June of 2000. I just couldn’t remember the exact date.
Seven years. That’s how long I’ve been married. It got me to thinking of the fabled “seven year itch.”
According to SmartMomma.com, the phrase comes from the fact that statistically speaking the average divorce occurs at the 7.2-year mark. I thought it might have something to do with the way Marilyn Monroe’s legs looked when her skirt billowed up. I don’t know where the SmartMomma folks got that figure, maybe from asking around to their divorced friends. I didn’t feel like doing any of my own actual research, so I’ll accept the 7.2-year quote as fact in the same way my sister would have had to have accepted as fact that my wife and I jetted off to Italy, bought an estate and gave the kids to a needy family down the street, had she or anyone else in my family been in the mood to ask me a question.
Thankfully, the SmartMomma people have some suggestions on how to avoid that 7.2-year curse on marriages. Again, and this is where I differ from some of the more helpful members of the species, I probably wouldn’t have handled the advice in just the same way. I likely would have told people that if hotels can go on without a 13th floor, pretending for everything they’re worth that there is no such thing simply by renaming it the 14th floor, then by golly us married people can avoid the seventh year altogether by renaming it the eighth year, or the ninth year.
The SmartMomma crew advises that we talk with our partners without distraction. Ah, there’s always that catch. Anyone who has been near me for more than five or so minutes will tell you that the act of talking, for me, is a distraction unto itself. Can’t help my marriage there.
Those SmartMommanians also advise us to tell our partners about any negative feelings we might harbor. I’ve been around a good many years now. I grew up in a Baptist church that urged congregants to do the same thing before taking Communion. And I can tell you, this is the stupidest idea I think I’ve ever heard. It’s in direct opposition to the next piece of advice, to “keep romance alive.” Not a chance of that happening if I’m going around all day disclosing all kinds of feelings that are better left feelings and not sayings. The SmartMomma group urges us to say, “This makes me feel like …” If you do this, and I’m urging you not to, once you fill in the dots, you’re next words will be something akin to, “This makes me feel like the time I was playing around with a sledgehammer and dropped it on my nose and all my friends laughed as I rolled around on the ground blind from the pain for a good half an hour.”
Embrace change, the Mommas say. The change is for the better, they say. Not if that change feels for all the world like the time you dropped a sledge hammer on your nose and all your friends laughed as you rolled around on the ground blind from the pain for a good half an hour.
The final piece of advice from the SmartMomma staff? Buy some marriage books.
Ah, here’s were I can help. I don’t agree. Don’t buy marriage books. Most of them were written by people who got divorced after 7.2 years of marriage. But pretend you bought them and, more importantly, pretend you read them. And tell your partner (to keep with the jaunty language of the SmartMomma crew) that everything you’re doing – forgetting about your anniversary, coming home late, forgetting to cut the grass for the fifth week in a row, etc. – is exactly what that marriage book told everybody they should be doing. Tell her that it said, and swear to it till the day you die, that you all had The Perfect Marriage, in uppercase letters like that, and that if she wasn’t able to see that, then the problem must be her. And then tell her that you don’t see any harm, just in case, in jumping forward a few years. Maybe celebrate 25 years of wedded bliss for your seventh anniversary. Who’s counting? Not me. That’s why I’m wishing my wife a happy (belated?) 50th anniversary.
Here’s looking at another 50 over the next decade.