What Does the First Year of Marriage Portend?

Dennis Prager, one of the most influential men in my life, spoke on his talk show recently about the impact of a first year of marriage. He asked if an easy, successful first year or a difficult, hard first year were indicative of the long-term success of the marriage?  He didn’t take a position either way, allowing callers to offer their stories, which were both positive and negative about the impact of their first years on their marriages.

As I’m about to survive, I mean celebrate, my first year of my second marriage, it raised some questions for me, worthy of thought.  Our first year has been both wonderful and rough, in many unforeseen ways, and I’ve wondered what it means for our future.  read more

I’ll (Not) Be Home For Christmas

This holiday season my wife and I will not both be home for Christmas. Instead we will celebrate our first year of marriage on separate continents.  As we are different races and religions, there are usually challenges we encounter at this time of year, so maybe being 7,000 miles apart will make it easier. We’ve actually resolved the big conundrum for me–the Christmas tree.

I don’t care if you call it a Hannukah bush or an ordinary tree; it is a Christmas tree, pure and simple.  It represents the birth of Christ and it’s not just a secular symbol.  But, it matters to my wife, so we resolved the issue by agreeing, like so many mixed religious couples, to celebrate both Christmas and Hannukah.  Since my boys were raised Jewish, and my younger son just became a Bar Mitzvah, it really isn’t an issue for me anymore. read more