January 28th, 2010
Just got married. Not for the first time; this was my third marriage. And I did it for no other reason but love.
Some get married to have children. I never did. Not this time either. My first wife and I were in love; she was twenty nine, I was twenty five. We knew the day of the wedding we shouldn’t be doing it. We just knew it wouldn’t last. We were married in a lovely, picture-perfect, little church in Unionville, Ontario. It couldn’t have been better. She couldn’t have children. Our marriage lasted three years. We broke up because we couldn’t see any reason to go on with a relationship that was adversarial. We didn’t see each other again and I was sorry to learn that she died at the age of sixty.
My second wife and I loved each other and we got married on Elbow Beach in Bermuda. We were both the same age, forty. A fairy tale wedding. Just the minister and two witnesses from the hotel desk, and us. As the minister pronounced us married, we were suddenly bathed by the sound of polite applause. Astounded, we turned around. Behind us, on the once empty beach, was a large group of people who had gathered to watch in their swim suits. The marriage lasted ten years. At first we tried to have children, but we had a miscarriage. Eventually we drifted apart intimately. We are still good friends.
This, my third marriage, was on a small ferry boat on the waters of Vancouver, British Columbia. We are in love. When we first visited Vancouver together, we rode the ferry across to Grenville Island, a tourist attraction with a great fresh food market. When we decided to get married we wanted to make it truly memorable. We rented one of the Granville Island ferry boats and set sail, or motored, under the bridges of False Creek and out to the beautiful waters that surround Vancouver at English Bay. There we exchanged our marriage vows and native carved wedding rings with a couple of friends and soon to be stepson.
All my marriages have been memorable with truly lovely women. I have been exceptionally lucky to know each one of them and I have learned so much from each. What was missing with the first two was a stable relationship. I would never have married again if I thought it wouldn’t work this time. Love is good, but marriage is so much more.
For me, this marriage means stability in love, in a relationship, a truly giving partnership with my best friend. We plan to travel more, to share our lives in a lasting and respectful way, to share each others qualities in a close relationship, and to focus on keeping our marriage successful and diverse. We are very comfortable with each other. This time our marriage will succeed, because this time we plan to stay in love.
"Love seems the swiftest but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century."
- Mark Twain
"Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years."
- Simone Signoret
"Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open."
- George Bernard Shaw
