On this foggy morning, I'm listening to the radio, and Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are" is playing.  Last night I was responding to Rebecca's post about divorce and starting over.  The song brought those thoughts back again.

Writing that response made me consider what was wrong about my first marriage and what is better in my life now.  In college, I spent a lot of time exploring, experimenting and trying new things - a normal part of the process.  I met my ex then, and we found a fair amount of common ground.  Unfortunately, too much of that common ground was in aspects of our lives that were not keepers.  They ended up being discarded along the way.  We didn't find new common ground to replace it.  When I faced my mother's cancer and death, he was not there for me.  Rifts formed.  We grew apart and could find no way to fix it.  

Starting over was brutally difficult in some ways and blissfully easy in others. It took years to find a healthy relationship, at a time when I least expected it.

You may be asking how the Billy Joel song plays into all of this.  It was our song at my first wedding.  In hindsight, it seems painfully ironic to realize how much I loved the idea of those lyrics, but that we both changed enough over the next five years that the lyrics were no longer true for us.

My second wedding was the opposite of the first - a simple city hall ceremony in front of a judge and one friend as witness, instead of a big production with 150 people.  We didn't feel a need for the big production, just the commitment.  We've supported each other through several crises and grown stronger.   

My husband is one of the sweetest, kindest people I've ever known.  I feel incredibly lucky to have him in my life.

When that song comes around again in a slightly different form, and we're older and grayer, it's real for me in a way that it never was the first time around.