Why October Will Always Be My Favorite Month

It's About Falling In Love With the Woman of My Dreams

Good morning from Scottsdale, Arizona, which is not yet sunny. Today's article is a doozy and not for the weak of heart.

Warning: It's a long article recently published on Medium, the world's largest membership-based platform for writers and readers who share a passion for the art of the written word.

Nonetheless, the article crushed it on Medium. I mean that the response to the article has already been 900 percent more than any article I've written in six years. That's partly due to the help of my writing coach over the last month and the power of the article.

Whether you read it or not, I'm grateful to all my subscribers for reading, commenting, and messaging me. I love it when you share the love.

My Secrets for Staying Married Thirty-Nine Years

The lost art of writing love notes

My wife and I celebrate thirty-nine years of marriage this month. Most of our friends call it a miracle. That’s because marrying a saint will make you a martyr. The real miracle is that my wife didn’t suffocate me in my sleep from all the stress I caused just by being myself.

Janice and I met during our first year in college. It was love at first sight for me, but not for her. She was one of the most popular girls on campus, and she already had a boyfriend, a senior, who could crush my underdeveloped body in a nanosecond.

Janice’s beauty radiated then, and it’s more glorious to me today. Despite the fuel of passion I felt whenever I saw her, it took me over three years to get my first date. In the meantime, like most college students, I did my best to overcome my deep-rooted insecurities of being away from home for the first time.

Janice and I became friends over the first few years of college. It was easy to run into each other often because we ran in similar circles. Plus, when we arrived at Ohio Wesleyan University in 1979, the student body was less than 1,500.

However, getting a date was nothing more than a dream I maintained through our senior year. But during the Spring of 1983, I asked Janice to go on a bicycle ride with me, and the rest was history. After that, I emptied my bank account to buy us tickets to a Santana concert in Columbus, Ohio, less than an hour’s drive from Delaware, Ohio, where OWU is based.

When Love Becomes a Springboard to Courage

Getting the courage to ask Janice out on a date happened spontaneously. I don’t know how to explain it other than the famous quote by Brené Brown: “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”

My first secret was showing up and being around Janice at every opportunity. Thank goodness there was no internet or smartphones back then. I would have found myself in a similar predicament to the one millions of younger people struggle with today: isolated, lonely, and addicted to screens, games, and other things that keep us out of the natural world where people get to know each other for real.

I have tremendous empathy for the young people who get stuck indoors, online, and living in the hell of comparing themselves to false ideals. To find our soul mate, we must interact with humans in the real world. Nothing online can compare to the electrifying feeling of infatuation en route to lasting love. That was true before the Information Age, and smartphones hijacked our brains.

Finding Common Ground

To Janice, I was nothing more than her Spring Fling. But we shared a passion for sex, bicycle rides, and parties on campus. We learned to disagree without fighting, to know each other’s likes and dislikes, and to find common ground despite our differences. It was that shared ground where we planted the seeds of enduring love.

To me, Janice was the love of my life, and I said to my parents following our graduation ceremony, “I’m going to marry Janice Miller.” That was her maiden name. My parents dismissed my folly as they often did. But I vowed to pursue Janice to the ends of the earth and marry her.

After graduation, Janice moved to Philadelphia. She had no interest in seeing me again. That crushed my juvenile soul. Since I had no job or plan, I decided to hustle a farm worker job about three hours North of Philadelphia. It was one of the earliest lessons in the power of taking a leap of faith.

Common ground like this can be solid enough to build a relationship from the beginning. It’s the same with farming. As the old saying goes, we reap what we sow.

Never Give Up Hope

The second secret is never to give up hope of being with someone you love. I don’t mean to become a stalker, but we must leverage our love as the fuel for hope and courage. Love takes time to evolve and kicks into high gear when the infatuation wears off, as it always does.

I wanted to be with Janice so severely that I convinced my farm boss to let me quit work early on an occasional Friday so I could spend the weekend dating her. She had roommates, and parties, and fun. I had a $3.50 per hour job on a farm with enough student loan debt to drown me five times over. However, working on a farm builds character, and with each passing day, I maintained my vision to marry Janice.

Long-Distance Phone Calls and Love Notes

It wasn’t long before my father asked me what I was doing with my life. He insisted I get a “real job,” and I landed a job in California before long. Why California? Because my father had friends in the hotel business, he made a few phone calls that led to one interview. That interview left me packing two suitcases and a backpack with all my worldly possessions.

Now I had a job, but I lost my girlfriend. It’s 1983. The only people who had cell phones were rich. I was poor, making $16,000 a year working in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I rented a small room in Hawthorne. The only phone I had access to was in the hotel conference room. I would sneak in when nobody was there and dial Janice’s apartment.

In addition to talking as often as possible, I wrote love notes and letters to Janice. I could afford to do so because a first-class U.S. postage stamp cost $0.20. Janice saved and treasures the many notes and letters I wrote to her.

Clear communication of your love is the key. It takes guts, phone calls, and love notes. We must let our lovers know how we feel.

Living In Unity Takes Time and Devotion

If staying married were easy, more people would do it. When two people from different walks of life and ideologies live together long enough, the power of true love leads us to unity. Therein lies the third secret to my long-term marriage. I had to surrender my selfish ways and learn to manage the tsunami of emotions we surf.

Janice has always been more emotionally mature than me, which could be true for most couples. After dating long-distance for six months, I saved enough money to fly Janice to California and buy tickets to Disneyland and Universal Studios. I also had enough money to purchase a boat trip to Catalina Island. The trifecta tour of Southern California was good enough for Janice to ask her parents if she could move and live with me. They reluctantly agreed, thank goodness.

Within six months, I got my first credit card to purchase the highest-quality engagement ring I could afford. I immediately maxed out the credit card limit and had enough cash to take Janice to dinner and propose. She accepted!

Today, we live in unity. We hardly ever argue. When we do, it’s over quickly, and I am the first to make amends because I’m usually the trigger for conflict. We have two healthy, happy sons who live near us in Arizona. And we await our second grandson in a month.

Living life in unity is worth the struggle. But to find that level of unconditional love, we must learn to endure and improve through every battle.

Aging with Grace

Janice and I are aging gracefully, even though my face is taking on the texture of beef jerky. Janice is radiant and more beautiful than ever. Like all couples, we are a work in progress, which leads me to the final secret of a long-term marriage: never cling to perfection. Focus on making progress and let the true nature of love build bridges that last the test of time.

That doesn’t happen overnight, at least not for us. The first reason is that, like most of us, I am confused infatuation with love. The former wears off, and the latter takes time eternal. Trust me on that one. It’s one of the most common mistakes couples make in our innocence.

If you want to know what we’re doing for our 39th anniversary, I will write a series of love notes to Janice and leave them around the house. I will do tasks for Janice without her asking because she refers to random acts of kindness as her “love language.” I will invite her on a date when we will have dinner. And I’m still looking for a venue with live music, even if it’s not Santana.

True love is a beautiful thing. Go for it by giving of yourself, and may you find the way to blissful unity with the one you love.

I write about the art of human transformation, transcending suffering, and overcoming life’s challenges with transcendent unconditional love and forgiveness. You can learn more about my strategic coaching work at www.CliffordJones.com .

? — Published by Libby Shively McAvoy at Dancing Elephants Press . Click here for submission guidelines.