The love that a lifetime brings

Unless I’m reading the transcript at a Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa hearing, I can barely remember what I said on air this morning. And yet, today, 35 years to the day from our wedding, I remember with irritating clarity what I said in my wedding speech. 

I went mock-biblical as a theme, and spoke of the time we met that fateful December. “And it came to pass in the summer of their days,” I said, “that the families journeyed southward to a place where the wind did blow and blow, and they called the place Muizenberg.” I spoke of how the meeting was engineered, and even acknowledged that as a family, we stood “head and shoulders below the rest”. 

And then I sang. Badly. But it was the gesture that counted. Along with the words from Randy Crawford’s Almaz, the line that truly captured it for me, “The love that innocence brings.” 

Indeed, we were young. The bride 19 and the groom 22. Unusual back then for a couple religious, but not from the haredi world. Yet we were blessed with parents who understood the value of marriage and relationships, and who gave us the chance to build a home while we were still studying and becoming ourselves. 

When you’re 19 and 22 you don’t know enough to be properly afraid. You have no idea what groceries cost, how often geysers burst, or how quickly children can turn a lounge into a crime scene. You have not yet discovered that “we need to talk” is never about the thing you think it’s about. You think love is mostly a feeling, and you assume communication means saying the words “I hear you” at the correct moments. 

Innocence doesn’t mean stupidity. It means you still believe the best about each other. It means that you interpret your spouse’s tone generously. It means you assume a misunderstanding is just that, not evidence of some deep character flaw that requires a four-part series and a therapist with good lighting. 

Over 35 years, you learn that love isn’t a single song. It’s a playlist, and some tracks are better than others. There are seasons of romance, seasons of routine, seasons of chaos, and the occasional season where you wonder if the person you married has been replaced by someone who cleans kitchen surfaces as a form of protest. 

And yet, and this is where I find myself unexpectedly sentimental, the longer you’re married, the more you understand what that line was really saying. 

“The love that innocence brings” isn’t only about being young. It’s about keeping a kind of innocence alive. Not naïveté, we’ve had too much life for that; but innocence as a choice: the choice to give your spouse the benefit of the doubt; the choice not to keep score; the choice to remember that the person in front of you isn’t the sum of the last argument but the sum of a shared life. 

It’s the innocence of remembering how it started. Two families in Muizenberg. A bit of wind. A bit of destiny. A bit of orchestration. And two kids who believed that love could carry a lifetime, without having any real evidence other than the fact that it felt true. 

The evidence, it turns out, comes later. It comes in the ordinary days. In making tea. In sitting through the same story again because it matters to the person telling it. It comes in the shared private language that couples develop; the looks, the shorthand, the single raised eyebrow that can say, “Please rescue me from this conversation,” or “Howard, if you mention this in public, you will be sleeping with Gatsby in the car.” 

So, yes, I remember my wedding speech. Not because it was brilliant. It wasn’t. I sang, which should really have resulted in an annulment on aesthetic grounds alone. I remember it because it captured something we didn’t yet know how to articulate: that innocence is a kind of strength. It’s the courage to commit before you understand the price, and then to keep paying it willingly. 

Thirty-five years later, I’m still grateful we were young enough to be innocent. And wise enough – or lucky enough – to choose each other anyway.