The Third Thing — SpiritScout

2023

I was chatting with a friend the other day and showed her the thoughtful gift our daughters had given us for our fortieth wedding anniversary. After admiring the piece, she looked at me quizzically and said, ‘How DO you stay married for forty years?’ (She is younger than me, married nine years.) I shared a few ideas and thought that would be it, but she hungered for more specifics. ‘Is this helpful?’ I said, and she confirmed that yes, it was.

I’d been scribbling notes about this landmark anniversary but was reluctant to write about it. One, because marriage is so personal, and two, because I don’t think that staying married a long time is an automatic sign of virtue. I believe that all relationships have dignity, a purpose, and a shelf life. A marathon of partnership is not everyone’s goal. We all come together to do the soul work of the spiritual contracts we have with the universe, and when that work is done, we move on to new lessons. There is a good reason why marriages experience different timelines—going the distance is not the gold standard or the only metric of success. Each relationship we grow through is a stepping stone in the process of discovering our highest good. So, unless you are still growing, enjoying, and loving the relationship—what’s the point of being married?

At a wedding in 1981. He was brave enough to join me after two months of dating…

We fall in love by chance, but we stay in love by choice. I’m married because I’ve worked hard to curate my personal happiness, and my husband continues to add to that happiness. My happiness is as important to him as his happiness is to me. By Instagram standards we didn’t have the smoothest of starts: our engagement story is still a joke too embarrassing to share outside the family; we don’t have one wedding photo that we cherish; and our honeymoon was spent in a tent because my betrothed didn’t know he needed to make hotel reservations for Bar Harbor in August. We started out as naïve, raw-dough 25-year-olds, but over four decades we have managed to mature as humans while learning to grow our love. We are deeply bonded by gratitude, humor, and delight in each other’s company.

Probably the most valuable tool in our marriage kit is knowing our core values. It takes a while to develop and hone them, but when used consistently, they are our superpower. They help us to make solid decisions, establish boundaries, and respect the red lines. Our core values are macro ideas that hold space for everything we care about. Each year, on our anniversary, we sit down to discuss our marriage contract which is built on Integrity, Freedom, Wellness, Prosperity, Enrichment and Vital Relationships. Through this filter we ask ‘What’s working, what’s not? What do we want more of, what do we want less of?’ We magnify the issues and then we try to manifest the solutions. So far we’ve chosen to re-up each year, and the reset button to our marriage gets refreshed.

Montana’s CGY five day Camp & Ride. 400 miles/25K of climbing around Yellowstone National Park 2019.

My husband’s nickname is Stealth. He has a low key, rock-solid energy that I adore; he is quietly remarkable. As a high energy person, I love the way he grounds me. He’s less emotionally emotive, I am more. We both love sports and snacks. The first time my mother watched him put away a meal she said, ‘He’s a keeper.’ Together we are curious about matters of the heart and have learned to polish each other’s stones: I don’t try to change him (anymore), all I ask is that he share more of the himself that I already love. Even though we met in a bar, we didn’t ignite in a haze of rhapsodic lust; our union was sparked with friendship and a clear-eyed trust. Turns out Integrity is the fertile soil that long lasting love needs to flourish—and that’s a level of sexy that time does not tarnish.

Your heart can be in two places at once: on the international border of Canada and USA in Derby Line, VT.

Through trial and error, we find that interdependence and transparency are non-negotiable for us. While we share a lot of fun activities —‘better together’—we also spend time apart traveling, with friends, and in the summer months I like to live at the lake while he commutes to me part-time each week. The bottom line? Freedom is the fresh air of marriage, and time for solitude and re-setting is essential for each partner. At the end of the day, no matter where we are in the world, we know we’re solid and that we have each other’s backs.

How exactly did we get to this point? I will be the first to admit that some of it was pure, dumb luck. Somehow our math added up to momentum and forty years has morphed our humble start into a happy blur. We’ve stayed healthy and prospered—Wellness and Prosperity are huge factors—and having fun together has been our touchstone along the way. While I’ve been managing a chronic illness for the past six years, we’ve learned to accommodate for that—no union is an open highway. Every day we try to plan for some kind of mini-adventure or challenge so that we feel like we are living our best life. The Enrichment isn’t always something major or time consuming, but it generally involves bikes or moving in nature, cooking and eating well, and engaging in meaningful work or pleasure. For us, the antidote to boredom is to arrest the feeling that that we are waiting for life to happen—or that it is passing us by. ‘Life. Be in it.’ is our watchword, and by making playtime a priority, it helps us to create momentum as a couple.

We call this level of rapture ‘The Third Thing’—an energy created from our bond, and the vehicle which elevates the mundane to the magical. Somehow, we instinctively started to create it before we even knew that it was a thing. The poet Donald Hall immortalized it for us: ‘Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.’

While it might appear to be an easy choice, I don’t recommend recruiting your children to be your Third Thing. They are not things, they are people. (And they move out way sooner than you can possibly imagine.) Our three daughters are the greatest gifts of our marriage, and parenting these Vital Relationships is an entire solar system unto itself within our martial universe. Rather, think about Third Things as anything you both feel a little bit of passion or curiosity about and are willing to feed that interest. Some people call them hobbies, but it’s more complex than that, it is something that permeates your thinking and becomes a characteristic of your coupling. Our ‘Third Thing’ is adventuring in nature, often via bicycle, and we add value to that experience by scoping out adorable bakeries, bookstores, and bike shops in different locations all over the world.

You don’t need to travel or spend a lot of money to build this energy, but you must be intentional and aligned about it. Even the comfort of our simple daily routines can be considered an adventure when we challenge and disrupt simple patterns—like when we try out a new recipe or playlist, invite guests over on a weeknight, or force ourselves to watch a documentary instead of Ted Lasso. Lately we’ve been walking a mile after dinner followed by twenty minutes of a Ted Talk. It’s satisfying to mix things up; I’ve noticed a little bit of novelty goes a long way to grease the wheels of happiness.

Our courting car: Stealth bought this 1967 TR4 when we first started dating and we’ve been cruising ever since.

I’m not going to lie, sometimes when Stealth and Trixie are canoodling I get a little jealous. ‘Could you just talk to me like you talk to the dog?’ has been mentioned more than once…

Everyone knows that marriage is not all puppies and bubbles. Sometimes we need to pull more than our share, and we gratefully draft on the down days; sometimes we crash if we are not paying proper attention to each other. On love’s wide pendulum the oscillation between pissed-and-blissed has a million emotions, and we are acquainted with them all. While fighting can be healthy and productive, I guarantee that living core values greatly reduces the nuisance of everyday conflict, mainly because we’ve already agreed on so much. As a result, when we do fight, it’s extremely ungratifying for me. I married a lover not a fighter. Stealth will say ‘We’re on the same team, let’s fight the problem not each other.’ For me, this bone killing comment crushes all possibility of conflict. I simply can’t fight right when he says it. Inevitably, his good sense gets us back to the table talking-to-resolving. We don’t always agree, but we do both feel like a compromise is possible, which gets us back to the fun bits faster (which is why we are married in the first place.)

People wonder, after forty years, ‘doesn’t it get boring?’ Not so far. I think fully committing to creating our best life, and then re-committing each year, gives us the courage to explore the deeper realms of our heart connection where we continually discover new things about each other. My affection for my husband compounds as I age, and I find that very pleasurable. Marriage is something we’ve learned to grok. It is not a subject that gives way to calculation or analysis, it’s intuitive and unrelenting. It’s a wonderfully mysterious gamble with no guarantees. Every marriage is a mixture of love highs and lows, curiosities, and ingenuity.

40 years of ‘Third Thinging’, Zermatt 2023

To create a delectable dish one needs salt, acid, bitter, and sweet. This same balance makes for a satisfying marriage. We need the dissonance of the unsavory, inconvenient, and sometimes boring so that we can experience the sublime. We may not get the recipe exactly right every day, but when we care enough to keep tweaking the mix, it is easier to appreciate what is being created year by year. For us, marriage has been the container and the witness for the entire span of our adult life experiences, and we choose—over and over again—to treat it as the precious cargo it is.

I’d love to hear from you—feel free to send your comments to me. Please share this post with a friend :) and thank you for reading!

The Wild Rose by Wendell Barry

Sometimes hidden from me

in daily custom and in trust,

so that I live by you unaware

as by the beating of my heart,

Suddenly you flare in my sight,

a wild rose looming at the edge

of thicket, grace and light

where yesterday was only shade,

and once again I am blessed, choosing

again what I chose before.