My niece graduated last weekend. We went up to Mass for it. The weird thing...

[NNadir]

...is that well, she's 21 years old and...

...that's how old my wife was when I moved in with her. I married my wife when she turned 22.

My niece, she's a nice kid, a little unsure of her direction, but well, that's just it, she's a kid. I just for some reason don"t think of her as an independent woman with a profound sense of herself in a fully adult world.

I hope I'm not being unkind in thinking that.

I was older than my wife when we married, but I always contend that she was the real grown up, but none the less I had to put up with a few "robbing the cradle" hostile jokes, which I politely shrugged off. To be clear I wasn't by any stretch the only older guy interested in her, and there were lots of men her age also after her.

I've been living with my wife for 42 years, married almost 41, and I love her more than I could ever have imagined I could love anyone. Our lives together have been magical, and my memory of our first years together fill me with a kind of awe as to how it happened at all.

Still, I wonder. My niece strikes me as an advanced adolescent.

People are different I guess. I hope. Everyone who met my wife when we were "just" lovers thought I should marry her and I took their advice, but still...

If she were older when she married she might have done better than me I think.

It's bothering me a bit.

[pfitz59]

1. My wife was 23 when we married.

I was 27. My folks were both 23 when they married. As was my daughter. My sons are 36 with no marriage in sight.

[NNadir]

2. My wife's mother was 22 when she married and that's how I came to marry my wife.

My mother-in-law married my father-in-law, a doctor, when he was 29.

They never divorced but the marriage was not a good one. They had children right away. My mother-in-law made it clear she was miserable.

I was living with my future wife and knew I was very much in love with her but I always felt tentative in our relationship, that I was there until something or someone else happened. I thought I couldn't possibly keep her in my life.

One day I was talking with her about how my father gave me my late mother's wedding ring, he said, "for safe keeping" and I told my future wife I would never marry her because I wouldn't want her to feel trapped like her mother by marrying her when she was so young. She was 21 at the time.

She got really mad at me.

I guess I was being defensive. I really did love her, but I couldn't imagine keeping her forever. It just didn't seem possible, particularly with so many guys hitting on her all the time. She could easily have walked away.

I reminded her when she got mad at me for saying I wouldn't marry her that she had always refused to ever tell me she loved me.

She said, "It's hard for me to say that."

I said, "I love you. It's easy for me to say because it's true. I love you."

Later that night in bed she told me she loved me too. Before that whenever I told her I loved her she'd say, "I know you do." It set in motion a kind of negotiation which ended with her making me take her to a Spanish restaurant, get down on my knees before the appetizers came and propose by offering her my mother's ring.

She said, "I'll think about it."

She could be a stinker.

By desert we were engaged, which did not make her parents happy, but sure as hell made me happy.

Part of the deal was that I promised her that if she ever wanted a divorce I wouldn't contest it, but the condition I wanted was a commitment to fidelity while we remained married.

I was pretty tired of "free love," girlfriends.

Eventually her parents accepted me after we eloped and it seemed like it was going to last, which it has. I never wanted anyone else and she never ran off with anyone else although she easily could have. It's been a far better marriage than the one her parents had, that's for sure.

I now love her in ways I could never have imagined loving anyone. It's been remarkable, not without struggle, but struggle that ultimately deepened our love for one another. She might have done better than me, but I could have never done better than her.

[Figarosmom]

3. Evidently she is satisfied with what she got

So quit fretting.

[NNadir]

4. Yeah, I know. I'm just sensitive because I took some crap for it at the time we first became lovers.

I had a friend who called her my "child bride."

She left home, more or less, when she was 17, and had lived on her own and supported herself while taking university classes, so by the time I got to know her, she was every bit an independent woman of considerable sophistication. She's had a number of serious relationships before getting to me and knew the good and bad of men.

She was telling me the other day that she had been approached on many occasions by lesser known Epstein types, and in fact, managed to escape a few close calls on "dates" she shouldn't have gone on.

I too was initially attracted to her looks, but when I arranged to meet her informally, I realized that she lacked a shred of vanity; was disinterested in her looks which she regarded as something of annoyance, since people got weird around her; I felt comfortable becoming a friend, putting aside romantic fantasies to try to see who she really was. I quickly learned who she really was was amazing, magnificent, bright, funny, open, generous, tolerant, a lover of beautiful things, of art, of nature, of science. of music and mathematics. We were pretty close friends for well over a year before we were lovers, and we made sure that in becoming lovers we remained friends, which we are to this day.

Now she's in her 60's, me in my 70's and we're still in love and that distance in age doesn't mean a thing anymore.

My niece though, she's a kid, chronologically the same age her aunt was when her aunt and I became lovers. It just struck me somehow.

[Figarosmom]

5. I can relate with your wife completely

There are many epstein types out there.

Young people now days do xseem naive to me even in their 20s. I'm happy that most live together now before the rings are exchanged and papers signed, that's for sure.

[zanana1]

6. You do your wife a disservice by thinking that.

She was smart enough to make a choice and she chose you.

[NNadir]

7. When you're right, you're right, and in this case you're right.

To be fair to me, she occasionally needles me on the point.

We did talk about in the context of my niece's graduation, how young she was when we fell in love and got married. She joked or half joked about being a "child bride," as she has from time to time over the years.

She often however muses about what she might have done differently when she was younger. She has regrets. As I love her, they, wound me.

Her childhood was not a happy one; she was the "Cinderella" among her sisters, little or no emotional support, limited and very uneven and very limited financial support, little guidance, so little that on several occasions she entered into situations that might have been very dangerous. Hell, I could have been dangerous.

I remind her selfishly that if her life had been different it would have been bad for me, which elicits a somewhat amused dismissal.

However if I mention our sons, how in another life they wouldn't have existed, she feels better about the life she chose.

We all muse about the paths we took, whether another choice would have led to a better life. I tell her in her case that if she had chosen some other path, she may have found herself wistfully wishing she'd chosen that in which she lives now.

She could have been someone's trophy wife; that's pretty clear. Those women who agree to be trophy wives often are exchanged for younger women as they age, since the criteria on which the relationship was built are on transitory states of being.

With me she's aged into a deeper beauty, like a precious wine that one actually doesn't consume because doing so would end the joy of the anticipation of actually drinking it.

The one flaw in her as over all these years she has never understood the ways in which she is or has been beautiful, not when it was merely looks, not when she was a lover, a mother, a friend, a partner, a sister, in any of the many aspects of who she's been over the years to each and all of us who love her.

She's hard on herself. Sometimes she acts as if she's been a failure, while in fact her life has been a spectacular success, at least as I aee it.. (My professional "success" such as it is, or was, was only possible because of her.)

I gave a talk at her mother's funeral and in it, in trying to mention only the good things her mother did while allowing for the cremation of the bad, I stated that her mother raised a daughter of whom I've spent my life trying to be worthy.

She was annoyed by that.

However she feels about herself, she has made my life worth living, and yes, somehow I think she knows and respects that.

Still my niece has left us wondering about and trying to remember where we were when my wife was my niece's age.

As for my doubts as to my worthiness, well you're right, I should respect her decision.