I’m afraid to celebrate 25 years of marriage. I think it’s self-defeating to say that something is good, because fate makes us pay later by spoiling it. But it’s something I want to celebrate; without noise, without a big party, but to remember.

A quarter of a century ago, the endings of Jane Austen’s novels seemed wonderful, if impossible. For me, love stories ended like Our Lady with Camellias or Anna Karenina, like Tosca or La bohemia. The endings were inevitably heartbreaking, no one dared to leave the ship when it began to sink, the characters were masochists.

My dream was to go and live in a loft in Europe and be suspended in the first act of an opera, the first chapter of a novel, where you are in frantic anticipation of what is to come. A crazy lover came into my life with whom I saw no other scene than settling down in a rickety chair, wrapped in an old blanket, taking out a quill and occasionally oiling it to write what would one day be my memoirs.

Is getting married at 18 a good decision?

I was there, fantasizing about my first great love, when my now husband convinced me that a wedding, fulfilling one of the most traditional rites, could be even more exciting than any dream I had at that moment. And, surprisingly, it was.

It is impossible in a short column to cover day after day between the two of us and our two daughters, moving from home, sometimes from country to country, friendships inherited or passed on and friendships that were witnesses and accomplices of our struggles. , relatives who continue in our lives to allow themselves to be loved and also those who seem forgotten, jobs won and lost, illusions shattered and ambitions realized.

If I ever thought that a wedding could be monotonous, that day has not come. I get excited with the same desire on the first day and die of rage with the usual outburst. I still marvel at the strange ideas that pop into my head and can only laugh out loud with my husband, who in turn gives me the joy of sharing my happenings (unintentionally in his case).

“I was just a housewife who never worked”: for 20 years he hides from his wife that he has 18 properties worth 14 million dollars, and he finds this out during the divorce

The terror I felt when I embarked on this adventure (the general prognosis was that we would be together for two years at most) subsided as we concentrated on mere economic survival.. It resurfaced with the arrival of our first daughter when it became inexplicable to us to bring someone into the world to take care of your every need. Looking back, we realize all the mistakes we made and that they are irreparable. What if we had listened to our mothers and not married?

I have no lessons learned; I can’t tell anyone how you make a relationship work. If there is a problem, I prefer to talk, if necessary to the point of exhaustion; if there is no solution, then at least through conversation it is possible to forget what the original conflict was. I’d have to ask my husband what his key was, but I’ll tell you straight away that it was patience. infinite. (OR)