Sunday Blog 218 – 18th January 2026
Like many teachers, my parents married in January. On an excruciatingly hot January day they embarked on more than six decades of wedded bliss adventure.
The in-joke each anniversary was like a nervous tick “X number of years and Never a Cross Word.” For their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2009, I immortalised this verbal tic into icing on a cake for them. (Top image, cake on right, Mum and Dad on the left.)
This celebration was less than a week before my wedding. Somehow I’d convinced Mum it was a great idea for my wedding to be held at their house. Dad needed no convincing and had spent months preparing the house for the wedding with his big energy. Their fiftieth wedding anniversary almost slid under the radar of the fuss of my wedding, during a week where Mum was always on the verge of a “why, oh why, oh why did I agree to host a wedding at my house?” meltdown.
The gap between the trope of fairytale wedding endings and reality is wide. Children have a ringside seat to the grinding reality of their parent’s marriage. Perhaps this is why we so enjoyed the tired “Never A Cross Word” joke. The chasm between the hope and experience could possibly be encapsulated by one of Mum’s quips a couple of years into her four-year widowhood. “I’m missing Dad so much I almost long for one of his homophobic rants.”
Dad died in 2020, Mum in 2024. January 2026 marked 67 years since they married as a mature couple (for that time, being 29 and 30 when they married was OLD.) They had chosen each other with the vulnerable hope of older adults and they made it work.
Feeling maudlin I slipped down to their graves with a bunch of flowers for their anniversary. Someone else had been to visit them, had left a small posy.(See small photo below Mum and Dad’s 50th anniversary pic).
This year was my 17th anniversary of getting married under Mum and Dad’s mulberry tree (bottom left, and there’s a wistful shot of me in 2024 looking up at the mulberry tree just before the sale of their house settled).
There have been cross words in those seventeen years. It took me at least fourteen years to work out that conflict in itself is not the problem. In fact, as the Gottman Institute for relationships and families states, 69% of conflict can never be resolved. It can only be managed. It’s how you repair afterwards, whether you feel closer or further away at the end of a conflict cycle that counts.
And that is perhaps the punch line. There will be cross words. And that’s OK.