By Rob Vaughn
5/20/2003
Note: This article originally ran in the Allentown (PA) Morning Call. Reprinted with permission.
A woman captured me in 1975. I still don’t want to be released. In this spring season of rampant marrying, I happily extol the institution of marriage. Blissfully married as I am these twenty-five years (we married in ‘78, three years after my surrender and capture), I want to argue vigorously the merits of matrimony and to urge the unhitched to hitch.
Angela was nineteen when I met her, full of words and life, effervescent, stunning, and busy entrancing various young men. She was doing just that when I first laid eyes on her: She had commandeered the front of our Temple University marching band bus and was regaling various male members with loud, amusing stories.
I was mesmerized. I was also shy, but I took a chance and blurted some stupid thing into the mix, caught her attention, and the rest, as they say, is history. I’ll skip the exhilarating details of our courtship, except to mention the amazing sign that confirmed our union: As we locked lips outside Johnson Hall at Temple, a passing bird took aim and fired, splattering us both. Smart-bombed in mid-kiss. Doesn’t get any clearer than that.
A quarter-century of life shared with this remarkable person doesn’t make me an expert on marriage (just ask her). It makes me a grateful champion of this way of living. Marriage is a lot of trouble—it is an adventure, said G. K. Chesterton, “like going to war”—but it’s worth it.
Wives are to husbands as milk is to Oreos. There’s a magical coalescence, a savory sense of completion. My wife is the garlic in my gravy. (South Philly Italian girls like Angela call their homemade spaghetti sauce “gravy.” And they use their cruel culinary powers to ensnare unsuspecting admirers. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
“He who finds a wife finds what is good” (Proverbs 18:22). The Bible says it; social scientists have now proved it. The National Marriage Project at Rutgers University has found that “both men and women live longer, happier, healthier and wealthier lives when they are married.” Unmarried co-habitation doesn’t cut it. The Project says “cohabitation typically does not bring the benefits—in physical health, wealth, and emotional wellbeing—that marriage does” and that “married people have both more and better sex than do their unmarried counterparts.” My paraphrase: Marriage is deeply satisfying.
Or can be. Indeed it is work. But worth it. Again, Chesterton: “In everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure.”
Yes. Marriage is not a roller coaster ride. Thrill rides are brief and traumatic (alas, so are all too many marriages). The better metaphor is the adventure or the heroic quest: long, difficult, sometimes tedious, interspersed with epic battles, but crowned with the glories of deep companionship, sweet victories, and sublime satisfactions that would otherwise be missed.
Or maybe I’m totally wrong. Maybe it’s just me. Are there other men out there who are finding the adventure wildly rewarding? Am I a dupe, brainwashed by this woman? It’s possible.
But whatever my mental state, let me state for the record: I love everything about this person. I love the way she looks, the way she walks, the way she thinks, the way she smells, the way she lights up a room. The way she has nurtured our kids and kindled their faith in God (and mine). The way she incomprehensibly holds me in high esteem.
If you ask me, love is, in fact, what it’s cracked up to be. Marriage—soberly contemplated, carefully cultivated—is the way to go. As we mark twenty-five years, our son gets set to start his adventure. Jim and Kelly, go for it. Godspeed.
And Angela: Happy anniversary.
Rob Vaughn is principal news anchor at WFMZ-TV in Pennsylvania.
