Luck be a lady tonight

I think there’s a bit of luck involved in having a successful long-term marriage. I mean, sure, there’s a ton of work, and we must have similar interests, values, goals and plans for the long term, but after 20 or 30 years of marriage, I think a lot of it also boils down to luck. There’s only so much we can control about the future us.

So even if at the beginning, our 27-year-old partner likes to travel and enjoys exotic foods, just like we do, there’s no guarantee that down the road, they will keep loving the same things and grow in the same ways as we do. People change over the years, and we can’t predict how much or what that will look like or where it will ultimately lead to. That’s why I believe that luck also has a role.

We don’t like to think about luck because it is beyond our control. Its either there or its not there, and that is disconcerting to many of us. I know it is for me. I never felt like a particularly lucky person before, so why should I get lucky now?

Marriage, or relationships in general involve a lot of work, planning, budgeting, analyzing, compromising and understanding and at some point, even with all that in place, we can still find ourselves peering over the edge of a cliff and jumping into the abyss, hoping and praying for the best. Sometimes, that’s just all there is.