Marriage takes effort;I’m having a blast

By all accounts, I think my marriage is great. I get compliments all the time on my wonderful wife.

Younger friends tell me they hope when they get married their relationship is as awesome as my marriage. Yet despite all that, sometimes I can’t help but feel that we must not be doing it right. Everywhere I go I hear how “marriage takes a lot of work” or “making a marriage work takes a lot of effort.”

Really? Because our marriage doesn’t feels like an effort. Believe me, I was in a previous marriage that felt like hard work. In fact, it felt like spending my days breaking big rocks into little rocks — with my teeth. When I finally reached my emancipation day from that seven-year sentence, it was all I could do not to click my heels together as I left the courthouse. I promised myself no more marriage. I was going to be a single guy and enjoy every minute of it. Didn’t quite work out that way.

One of my tasks at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard was to head a mentoring committee. In this capacity I was constantly getting emails from fellow committee members and other employees. Every so often I would get one from what I assumed to be some guy named “Glen” who preferred to go by “Glenny.” He wanted to join the committee, and he seemed to know me despite that fact that I had no clue who this guy was.

And he sure wrote, um, feminine with lots of smiley faces and lingo that made me a bit uncomfortable. I ignored most of his emails. At the same time and (I thought) totally unrelated, there was a small, brown girl who I ran into at all the apprentice committee meetings who was always so nice, knew my name and said, “Hi, Ben!” every time we passed.

Pretty girl, but I had a clue what her name was.

So one day, shortly after wrapping up my divorce and still bouncing back and forth between elation and depression over the whole thing, I was walking to the parking lot after work when the previously mentioned pretty little brown girl walked fast to catch up to me and initiated a conversation. That conversation lasted for more than an hour as we watched all our co-workers get in their vehicles and drive home. I felt awkward since I didn’t know her name and somewhere in there I learned that, thank God, this was Glenny! I learned she was a first-generation American Filipina and that despite being extremely book smart and educated, was working as an inside machinist at the shipyard in order to help pay bills. Cool.

You know that rule about rebounding right after a split? Yeah, we pretty much broke that. We started dating within weeks. She moved in a month later and we got married about a year after that. But what I remember being so different about the dating was that unlike all my previous years, I approached it differently. Young guys like to strut like peacocks, pretend to be somebody they’re not and do whatever it takes to impress a girl. Problem is, when you succeed either you’re stuck having to be that person all the time or she figures out who you really are and you may have problems (and yes, girls are just as guilty of this). So when I started dating Glenny I was myself — my knuckle-dragging, caveman-yet-old-school-gentleman self.

And it worked.

But just to make sure, somewhere during those early days we both distinctly remember the day I said, “Glenny, if we’re going to get serious, there’s some things you need to hear before you make up your mind. I’m stubborn. I can be hot-headed. I won’t ever intentionally take you for granted, but sometimes I will anyway. I fart. I scratch myself. I’m a hopeless dinosaur in my views, and there will be days when for no reason I just feel like getting up and going on a road trip. At the end of the driveway I may turn left or I may turn right. I may change my mind and just turn around and go home. And you’ll be welcome to come along, but either way I’m still going to go. If you feel you can handle that, here I am. Otherwise, I don’t blame you for backing out now. Just know that I’m never going to change.”

Glenny looked at me for a minute, smiled, then laughed, said she’s the same way and gave me the same option. Who knew I had hit on the best pick-up line of all time?

We’ve been married for years now and we’re still waiting for the spark to fade like everybody says it does. Unlike many guys and gals who have to have their time away from their spouses in order to hang out with the fellas or hang out with the girls, we prefer to be together all the time. That’s something else that every psychologist, marriage counselor and therapist says isn’t “healthy.”

But what can I say? We’re truly best friends and we just have more fun hanging out together. Of course, having a wife who in addition to all her “girl stuff” also likes to shoot, hunt, fish and get dirty is a bonus. (Just last weekend she came out and helped me adjust the headlights on the van.)

So I’m still waiting for this “hard work” stuff I hear about all the time. Personally, I give different advice to my teenaged boys. I tell them to just be themselves and if a girl likes that and if they like her for the same reason, they’re set. My oldest boy has figured it out; not so sure on the younger ones. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I look at this as “hard work” about as much as I used to look at car racing as “hard work.” Sure it takes effort, but I’m having a blast!

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column under the tagline “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.