Maybe They Do

Two months ago, Allyson and I entered a contest called America’s Favorite Couple.

Why? Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure.

It started with a simple, “Why not?” which quickly became, “What’s the worst that could happen?” And then, somehow, round after round, as we kept advancing, it became something neither of us expected: “Wait. Could this actually happen?”

Suddenly this silly little thing we had entered on a whim didn’t seem quite so silly anymore. We made it through one round, then another, and another. We started asking people to vote. Then we started asking them to share. Then there were double-vote days and Facebook posts and text messages and QR codes and increasingly desperate pleas to friends, family members, coworkers, former students, current students, theatre people, church people, and probably a fair number of unsuspecting strangers.

Somewhere along the way, there were also approximately 7,482 references to Jeff Goldblum.

Because the grand prize included $20,000 and a date night with Jeff Goldblum. And listen, I have absolutely no idea what one wears on a date with Jeff Goldblum, but I was fully prepared to get a girdle and go!

We kept advancing. Top 20. Top 15. Top 10. Top 5. Quarterfinals. And finally, somehow, from over 2,000 couples to being in the semifinals. What started as “Why not?” had become, “Holy crap. We might actually do this.”

We didn’t.

When the semifinal round ended, we hadn’t climbed high enough to advance to the finals. There would be no $20,000. No date night with Jeff Goldblum. No title of America’s Favorite Couple.

And strangely enough, when it was all over, I realized I wasn’t nearly as disappointed as I thought I might be. Because somewhere during those two ridiculous months, the contest stopped being about winning. It became about our story.

And man, do I love our story.

This year marks 25 years of marriage for Allyson and me and 28 years since we first became an “us.” Sometimes I have to sit with that number for a minute. Twenty-eight years. We were practically kids when we met, and we certainly didn’t know what the next 28 years were going to contain. How could we?

When I look back at the 21-year-old version of myself she met, I honestly cannot figure out what in the world she saw in me—aside from my sense of humor. Truly. I had no real job. I had no education. I had no direction. I was living at home, partying all night, sleeping all day, making some spectacularly terrible life choices, and generally had no idea what I was doing with myself. I could probably count the genuinely good influences in my life on one hand, and I was floundering. I didn’t have some grand plan waiting to be put into motion. There wasn’t a promising career just around the corner or some obvious trajectory suggesting that I was going places. I was just...lost.

And somehow, she saw something in me anyway.

That’s the part that gets me when I look back now, because the person I am today is so far removed from that 21-year-old kid that sometimes it’s difficult for even me to reconcile the two. I’ve gone back to school. I’ve built a career. I’ve become a teacher, a director, a father, a husband, and a person who actually has some idea of what he believes and what he wants his life to stand for. I’ve failed spectacularly at things. I’ve gotten back up. I’ve changed directions more times than I can count. I’ve grown up—although Allyson may dispute the extent to which that last one has actually happened.

The very few people still in my life who knew me back then can attest that I—like Virginia Slims—have come a long way, baby.

But I don’t say any of that to pat myself on the back or to create some romantic version of our story where Allyson swooped into my life, saw the diamond in the rough, fixed me, and we rode happily into the sunset together. That’s not how any of this works. She didn’t save me from myself. I had to make my own choices. I had to do my own growing. I had to decide, over and over again, what kind of man I wanted to become.

And while I was changing, so was she.

That’s something I don’t think we talk about enough when we talk about long marriages. You don’t really marry one person and then spend the rest of your life with that exact same person. How could you? If you’re doing any kind of living at all, you’re both going to change. Life changes you. Becoming parents changes you. Success changes you. Failure changes you. Grief changes you. Age changes you. Faith changes you. Disappointment changes you. The things you survive together change you.

So over 28 years, Allyson hasn’t just loved one version of me. She’s known a whole collection of them. She knew the 21-year-old who was floundering. She knew the young husband trying to figure out how to be a husband. She knew the terrified new father. She’s known the dreamer and the screwup, the teacher and the director, the confident version of me and the one who couldn’t get out of his own head. She’s known me when I was succeeding and when I was falling apart. She’s watched me change careers, change directions, change my mind, lose myself, find myself, and become someone neither of us could possibly have imagined when we first met.

And I have watched her become, too.

That doesn’t mean we’ve loved every version of each other equally well. We haven’t. It doesn’t mean every chapter has been beautiful. It hasn’t. And it certainly doesn’t mean we’ve spent 28 years gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes while a Hallmark movie soundtrack played softly in the background.

Marriage is hard.

Sharing your life with another human being means sharing your whole life—not just the parts you’d put in the Variety magazine spread. You get the celebrations and the vacations and the inside jokes and the laughter and the babies and the Christmas mornings. But you also get the exhaustion and resentment and disappointment. You get the bad moods and stupid arguments and hurt feelings. You get the parts of yourself you’d rather nobody see and the parts of the person you love that aren’t particularly lovable at the moment. You get to know another person closely enough to know exactly where they’re fragile, and they get to know the same things about you.

You get the wonderful.

And you get the ugly.

We’ve had plenty of both.

In fact, there have been three different times in our marriage when we came frighteningly close to calling it quits. Three times when the life we’d built together wasn’t enough, by itself, to guarantee that we would keep building it. Three times when “forever” suddenly felt a whole lot less certain than it had when we were standing across from each other making promises about it.

I don’t say that because I’m proud of it, and I don’t say it because I think nearly ending a marriage is some sort of prerequisite for having a strong one. I say it because it’s true. It’s part of our story. If I’m going to celebrate 28 years together, I don’t want to pretend all 28 of them were easy. Some of them weren’t. Some seasons were painful. There were times when we hurt each other, times when we failed each other, and times when I’m sure both of us wondered whether loving each other was going to be enough.

But each of those three times, eventually, we chose.

Not once, standing across from each other when we were young and optimistic and had absolutely no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

Again.

We chose each other again.

And I think that’s the part of marriage I understand differently now than I did when I was 21. Marriage isn’t one enormous choice you make on your wedding day and then spend the rest of your life living out. It’s thousands upon thousands of choices. Sometimes they’re easy choices. Sometimes they’re joyful ones. Sometimes choosing each other looks like laughing until your stomach hurts or planning the next adventure or sitting together doing absolutely nothing.

And sometimes choosing each other is work.

Sometimes it means having the conversation you don’t want to have. Sometimes it means admitting you were wrong. Sometimes it means forgiving something you aren’t quite ready to forgive. Sometimes it means sitting in the ugly instead of pretending it isn’t there. Sometimes it means looking at the person across from you and recognizing that neither one of you is who you were when this whole thing started—and deciding whether these two new people still want to build a life together.

Three times, we got close enough to the edge to know there was an edge.

And three times, we chose to turn around.

I think that’s part of what makes us us.

Not that we’ve somehow figured out the secret to marriage. Good Lord, no! Not that we never fight or hurt each other or get tired of each other or occasionally wonder how one human being can possibly snore that loudly after nearly three decades. We’re still two flawed people trying to share one life, and sometimes we’re spectacularly bad at it.

But we’ve grown through what we’ve gone through.

The wonderful has shaped us, and so has the ugly. The victories have shaped us, and so have the failures. The years when loving each other felt effortless matter, and so do the years when choosing each other required considerably more effort.

Maybe that’s what 28 years together actually represents. Not 28 perfect years. Not a love story without scars. Not proof that we somehow got marriage “right.” It’s 28 years of becoming. Twenty-eight years of screwing up and figuring things out. Twenty-eight years of knowing each other at our best and at our absolute worst. Twenty-eight years of choosing.

And somehow, after all of it, we’re still here.

You don’t know when you’re beginning a life with someone what that life is actually going to ask of you. You know the things you’re hoping for, of course. You imagine the trips and the holidays and the house and the kids and the photographs you’ll hang on the walls. You imagine growing older together and all the milestones you’ll collect along the way.

You don’t necessarily imagine the other stuff—the disappointments and the fear, the arguments and the money problems, the plans that don’t work out, the nights when one of you is falling apart and the other one has to somehow hold everything together, or the seasons when you aren’t quite sure what comes next. Nobody stands at the beginning of a relationship knowing exactly what they’re signing up for. You just choose someone, and then, if you’re lucky, you keep choosing them again and again and again.

Allyson and I have had 28 years of choosing.

We’ve raised three kids. We’ve taken amazing trips. We’ve had ridiculous adventures and laughed until we couldn’t breathe. We’ve had heartbreaks and setbacks. We’ve started over. We’ve gotten things spectacularly wrong. We’ve worried about our kids and our future and our finances and all the things people worry about when they’re trying to build a life together.

Through every version of that life, she has been there.

Allyson is, without question, the best thing that has ever happened to me. That’s not hyperbole. There have been moments in my life when I genuinely don’t know what I would have done without her. She has stood beside me and, more times than I could ever count, carried me through some of the darkest moments of my life. She has championed me, encouraged me, prayed with me, fought with me—and occasionally fought me, because apparently 28 years together does not magically make another human being agree with everything you say. Rude.

She has laughed with me. She has called me on my crap. She has reminded me who I am when I’ve forgotten. She has believed in me during seasons when I couldn’t seem to find much reason to believe in myself. She has been my partner, my teammate, my safe place, my sounding board, my reality check, my biggest cheerleader, and, more times than she probably knows, my lifeline.

And here’s the part I’m still learning how to say out loud: for a lot of my life, I’ve had a hard time believing that good things happen for me.

I can believe they happen for other people. I can celebrate other people’s victories. I can recognize their blessings. I can look at someone else’s life and think, “Look at all the good.” But when it comes to my own life, I’ve sometimes been much better at cataloging what went wrong—the disappointments, the losses, the things I wanted that didn’t happen, the doors that closed, the prayers that seemed unanswered, and the moments when life didn’t turn out anything like I thought it would.

Somewhere along the way, I think I started expecting disappointment. Maybe there’s some strange sense of safety in that. If you don’t expect too much, maybe it won’t hurt quite as badly when it doesn’t happen. If you prepare yourself for the other shoe to drop, maybe you won’t be quite so surprised when it does.

Except I’m beginning to wonder what else we miss when we live that way.

Because 28 years with Allyson have been quietly teaching me something I apparently needed a ridiculous online couples contest to finally notice: maybe good things do happen for me.

Maybe I’ve been so busy looking for the giant, unmistakable, confetti-falling-from-the-ceiling kind of good things that I’ve overlooked the ones sitting right beside me. Maybe the good thing isn’t always getting what you wanted. Sometimes the good thing is having someone there when you don’t. Maybe the blessing isn’t the absence of hard things, but discovering that you don’t have to walk through the hard things alone.

Maybe winning doesn’t always look like winning.

We didn’t win America’s Favorite Couple, but for two months, thousands of votes came in from people who decided our little story was worth supporting. Friends shared our posts. Family members sent the link around. Former students voted. Current students voted. People from completely different chapters of our lives suddenly found themselves on the same ridiculous Team Jere & Allyson. People we hadn’t talked to in years resurfaced to tell us, “I’m still voting!” Some of you set alarms. Some recruited your families. Some shared the link over and over and over again. And some of you probably developed a Pavlovian response to the phrase “DOUBLE VOTE DAY.”

You let us hound you and harass you for two straight months, and you cheered us on anyway.

That mattered. Not because every vote moved us closer to $20,000, but because every vote reminded us that there are people in our corner. And sometimes you forget that. Sometimes life gets small. Your world becomes whatever problem happens to be sitting directly in front of you. You get so buried in surviving your own stuff that you forget to look around and notice the people standing nearby.

This contest made us look around.

And there you were.

I would have loved the $20,000. Let’s not get ridiculous here. And I remain deeply disappointed that Jeff Goldblum will apparently have to go through life without experiencing a date night with Allyson and me. His loss, really.

But I think I understand the prize differently now.

The prize was getting to tell our story. It was watching people we love rally around us. It was having something completely ridiculous to laugh about together for two months. It was remembering how much life Allyson and I have already lived side by side. And maybe most importantly, it was looking at the person I’ve spent nearly three decades with and realizing, again, that I’d still pick her.

For every adventure and every setback. Every victory and every heartbreak. Every ridiculous idea and every ordinary Tuesday. For all of it, I’d pick her.

Maybe that’s what this whole hare-brained adventure was actually supposed to remind me. I don’t have to be America’s favorite anything. I don’t need a title to tell me what I’ve got, and I don’t need to win a contest to recognize that somehow, against all the odds I have spent a lifetime keeping track of, something extraordinarily good happened to me.

Her name is Allyson, and she’s been standing beside me for 28 years.

With her beside me, the Lord above me, and this absolutely ridiculous village of people behind us, I’ve learned there isn’t much I can’t face.

Maybe good things don’t always arrive the way we expect them to. Maybe sometimes they don’t look like winning. Sometimes they look like losing a contest and realizing you already have the prize.

For much of my life, I’ve struggled to believe that I could possibly be this fortunate, this blessed, this loved. I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for the other shoe to drop and keeping score of the things that didn’t work out the way I hoped they would.

Maybe I’ve been keeping the wrong score.

Because America didn’t choose us as its favorite couple.

And I didn’t get my date with Jeff Goldblum.

And there’s no $20,000 check coming in the mail.

And I got to spend two months celebrating the woman I’ve spent nearly three decades loving. I got to watch our friends and family show up for us over and over again. I got to tell our story. I got to be reminded that there are an awful lot of people standing in our corner. And I got another reminder that the person I chose all those years ago is still the person I want standing next to me for whatever comes next.

Maybe I was wrong about good things.

Maybe they do happen for me.

Maybe she’s been the proof all along.