New Couples vs Married Years++ Couple

Today I had two great moments where I could very obviously see the difference between new relationships vs long time married couple's relationships.

At work, we celebrate First Friday with a staff Mass and a pizza party. It's not much, but it's an hour a month where the whole staff is together in prayer and then gets to hang out, and NOT talk about work! Today's conversation revolved around our favorite TV shows. One of my co-workers who is newly married, described how she and her husband each picked two shows that the other one is to watch with them, so as a couple they have four shows: two of his and two of hers. Cute :) All the ladies who have been married 20+ years chimed in, "forget that - I have a TV upstairs and he has one downstairs" or "we have one TV with two remotes!" or "we TiVo everything and watch it when the other one isn't home". Now that sounds more like reality :) haha

My turn for sickeningly cute. I normally call Eric every morning when I get up / get going in the morning, just to say hi (my excuse: we don't live together, I want to talk to him first thing). Eric calls me at night before he goes to bed (he goes to bed earlier than me, and we can catch up on our days if we didn't see each other). Eric has been in Japan since Monday and I've missed our daily phone conversations so we've been emailing a paragraph or two about our days to each other. Cute :) My Dad left for Florida late last night. He texted my mom that he arrived and they hadn't talked since. During dinner I asked Mom what Dad was up to, and she said, "oh I guess I better call him". haha.

Now by no means do the "old married couples" not love each other as much as the new couples. In fact, I would venture to say they probably love each other in a deeper and more complex way than the new couples can even imagine. After 25+ years it just looks a lot different.

I love my parents. I love that they will celebrate 28 years of marriage this June. I love that until my grandpa died in February, Eric and I were going to have FOUR couples at our wedding married 50+ years. At our wedding we've decided to have both sets of parents light the unity candle, not just the moms, because we know just how blessed we are that both sets of parents have been married for over 25 years. It's really something amazing to celebrate!