The Virtues of Forgetting About Yourself

My wife and I celebrated our 10^th wedding anniversary in April, and we couldn’t have asked for a more picturesque setting.

After a day of cruising past the Statue of Liberty and strolling down Fifth Avenue, we sat in a fancy restaurant right along the Hudson River. Straight across from us stretched a full view of the Manhattan skyline, glimmering as the sun sank low on a beautiful spring day.

“To the last 10 years and to 10 more that are just as great,” I said, or probably something slightly less eloquent, as we tapped our champagne glasses.

Caught up in the moment, I just barely felt a tugging at my shirt sleeve. Must have been my imagination. No, wait, there it was again.

And then came the screech: “Daddy! I need more BUTTER on my bread!”

Right. That would be our 5-year-old daughter, a special guest for this romantic occasion.

From the other side of the table came a strangled braying, resembling the groans of a donkey having a seizure.

That would be our 8-year-old son, well covered in the bread-and-butter department and sounding his appreciation.

We didn’t actually plan to have our kids join us for a trip to New York City over our anniversary weekend, but it kind of worked out that way. As in me looking at the calendar one day and realizing that a long-planned spring break trip to Manhattan would overlap with this milestone anniversary.

“Let’s look at this positively,” I explained to my wife. “This will be a cheaper anniversary dinner than if we had to pay a sitter in North Carolina.”

My wife did not entirely appreciate this cost-benefit analysis. But we’ve been married 10 years. Did she really expect something different?

And in the end we agreed it would be quite appropriate to have the kids with us. What better way to put the last 10 years in a nutshell?

Because, all joking aside, this is true: getting married and having kids are the two best things that ever happened to me, with the exception of one other thing – and I’ll get to that in a minute.

No Time to Think About Myself

Guys tend to romanticize their bachelor days, but I don’t romanticize mine. I recall them instead as the “Golden Age of Free Time” that was totally squandered in an astonishing display of self-indulgence, navel-gazing, and distraction.

I spent my first decade out of college, for instance, pondering the essays I’d like to write. I didn’t write the first one until my son was a year old, when I realized in a flash of insight that my free time was gone and wouldn’t be coming back.

Those modest beginnings eventually led to my book The Messy Quest for Meaning: Five Catholic Practices for Finding Your Vocation, which Ave Maria Press recently published. In the first couple chapters, I explore the other best thing that ever happened to me – a serious anxiety disorder in my mid-20s that forced me to reimagine my life.

Someone recently asked how I recovered from that disorder, which wreaked havoc for a couple years. Recovery involved a lot of things – exercising, cutting out caffeine completely, overhauling my diet, keeping a journal, talking through things with the woman who became my wife.

“But you know what maybe the biggest thing was?” I told my questioner. “I got married and had kids. Then I no longer had time to think about myself.  And when you start thinking about other people instead of yourself so much, you feel a heck of a lot better.”

Right outside a window at the restaurant where we celebrated our anniversary, a couple fresh from their wedding was posing for photos on a deck that extended over the river.

“How crazy is that?!” my wife said. “Here we are on our 10^th, and they’re just getting started!”

It is crazy and wonderful, too, this institution of marriage, which has, among many other excellent things, taught me when to focus on myself and when not to. If I could have one wish for that couple, it would be that the next 10 years teach them to forget about themselves from time to time, too.

(photo credit: Tony Fischer Photography)