Marriage is hard. And when you are single you don’t see it coming; you just see stars and hearts and love and “my life will be better when…,” but it isn’t always that way. Now to be perfectly fair, it starts out that way (which is good because if it didn’t, then none of us would be married).

Craig and I had a doozy of a weekend, and on the upswing of it all, he said to me, “For better or for worse, right?” And I said, “You mean for better and for worse.” That’s the way the vows should read because, really, that’s the way it is.

I don’t need to give you the play by play, but suffice it to say that if we were to weight the balance, then sometimes the heaviest rocks are on Craig’s side of the scale, sometimes they are on mine. This weekend, we both started out with fairly heavy rocks, but in the end, mine pulverized his.

There are a variety of words that would have been appropriate to describe me on Saturday, none of them found in the New Testament. A few maybe in the Old.

But it’s over now and things are sweeter. And it’s true that sometimes the best things are those you have to work the hardest at. But nobody told us it was this hard before we got married. Or at least, somehow then, it seemed like an insignificant detail.

Marriage isn’t the only thing that fits this description. Our entire lives can be summed up by the “for better and for worse” manta. Our poor children have been born into the life of “nothing can be simple.” Tonight we thought it would be fun to surprise them by taking them to see Curious George at the $3 cinema in St. Charles. I double checked the website, printed a map, we stopped by the bank for cash to avoid their ATM fees, and off we went. We got there and for tonight only – Curious George was broken – the projector wasn’t working. We looked at each other and busted out laughing – so typical for us.

We watched The Pink Panther instead. And you know? The girls didn’t mind. They were so excited to be in a theater (albeit one circa 1976 complete with original sound and one extra wide aisle smack down the middle of the theater) and loved that we bought popcorn while we were there (they offered free refills, so our family of six got one to share – places like that love us). They loved that for an evening, we were together. Nobody was on a computer, nobody had to go to the library, nobody needed to run errands alone. We just did it together. And it was fun. And though the evening didn’t turn out as we expected it to, it wasn’t ruined.

I need to remember this with my marriage. Things aren’t as I expected them to be. Craig isn’t who I expected him to be. I’m not who he expected me to be. Heck, I’m not who I expected me to be. But we’re not ruined. We may just be living The Pink Panther alternative version instead of the cute and simple Curious George one. But that’s okay. We’re doing it together.

Now if I could just get the theme song out of my head…