I didn’t marry my wife in a movie moment of fireworks and roses—I married her in a diner booth with grease-stained menus.

When I was twenty-one, broke, and working shifts at a gas station in Indiana, I met Rachel.

She was a waitress at the diner across the road, hair tied back with a faded bandana, sneakers squeaking on the tile floor. She slid me free refills of coffee I couldn’t afford, and before long, she slid me her phone number on a napkin.

We got married fast. Too fast, my mother said. Our wedding wasn’t a white-lace fairytale. It was the town hall, two rings from Walmart, and a Polaroid taken by a cousin.

But it felt like fire—loud, reckless, alive. We were kids with a beat-up Chevy, a stack of cassette tapes, and the belief that love could carry us through anything. And in those early years, maybe it could.

Then life got heavier. Mortgage papers replaced road maps. Instead of driving west just to see the sunset in Arizona, we drove to daycare, then to night shifts, then to Walmart at midnight because diapers don’t wait.

Rachel and I argued about bills, about her late hours, about me being too tired to help with the laundry. Some nights, the only words we exchanged were “goodnight” muttered into the dark.

But love has a way of hiding in the cracks. In the sandwich she packed in my lunchbox with an extra cookie “just because.” In the way I fixed her old Toyota in the freezing driveway so she could get to work the next morning.

In the silence of us both too tired to talk, but still leaning against each other on the couch. That’s when I realized love wasn’t fireworks anymore—it was the steady hum of an engine that kept us moving forward.

Then came the storm years. The 2008 crash nearly took our house. I lost my job at the plant. Rachel worked double shifts at the nursing home until her feet swelled, and I stood in unemployment lines feeling like less of a man.

We sold the Chevy, the kids wore hand-me-downs, and we learned how to stretch a pot of chili for three nights. It should have broken us. But every time I looked at her across that scarred kitchen table, I thought: if we can survive this, we can survive anything.

By the time the kids grew and left, our house was quiet in a way that felt wrong. The laundry basket was empty. No shoes by the door. Just the two of us, circling each other like strangers who’d forgotten the language of “us.”

And then—life threw another test. COVID shut down the town. For months, we barely saw the kids, only their faces frozen on glitchy FaceTime calls.

Friends of ours didn’t make it. Rachel lost two coworkers within weeks. I got sick, bad enough that she sat by the bed every night, hand cool on my forehead, whispering prayers she hadn’t said in years. When I got better, I held her and we both cried like kids.

Funny thing: somewhere in all that quiet, we found each other again. We started walking the neighborhood every morning, just to move. We planted tomatoes in the backyard.

We argued over how to work the damn smartphone, then laughed until our stomachs hurt. The silences between us stopped feeling heavy. They felt earned.

Now I’m sixty-two. Rachel’s hair is silver, mine is thin. She still wears that bandana when she gardens.

Her hands are rough from years of work, but when she slips them into mine, I swear they still fit like they did the first day I held them in that diner booth.

Looking back, marriage never stayed in one stage. It was fireworks, then survival, then rebuilding, then rediscovering. It was sharp edges that softened into something stronger.

People ask me sometimes what the “secret” is. Truth is, there isn’t one. It’s just waking up every day and choosing the same person—even when it’s hard, even when it’s boring, even when life feels like it’s trying to pull you apart.

Because love isn’t about avoiding storms. It’s about standing in the rain, holding the same hand you held when the sky was clear, and saying, “We’re still here. We’re still us.”