With this ring I thee wed ...

Marriage is a serious proposition.

I should know.

Forty years ago tomorrow I walked down the aisle and said "I do." Maybe I said "I will" too. My memory of the wedding is a bit fuzzy. I do remember that an airplane, probably from nearby Whiteman Air Force Base, broke the sound barrier just as my new brother-in-law hit the high note in "The Lord's Prayer." It would be hard to forget something like that.

First marriages are pretty much uncharted territory for newlyweds. Whatever high ground a couple gains from those premarital counseling sessions and sage advice from family and friends and the role modeling of others, there is plenty of quicksand waiting to swallow young men and women who have just tied the knot.

Goodness, how young and naive and inexperienced and broke we were. But we didn't know any better. We had no idea the time would ever come that we wouldn't be up to our earlobes in debt. We hadn't even thought about the awesome responsibility of being parents. We would have hooted if anyone had suggested we should set aside a portion of our meager paychecks for retirement.

Retirement? That's for old people.

Right. Old people celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary.

How did that happen?

Our wedding was on a Friday in my wife's hometown in the family church across the street from the family home. I had taken a three-day weekend off from my two-week-old job as a summer intern at The Kansas City Star. "What?" the incredulous assistant city editor had asked when I told him the day I started my job that I would need time off to get married. "A whole weekend?"

No sir, I said. A whole three-day weekend.

My wife had just signed a teaching contract in the North Kansas City School District, which at that time was the highest-paying district in Missouri. Combined, our gross income over a year was less than $10,000. We lived in an attic apartment accessible only by a fire escape hanging off the rear wall of a three-story house.

We had no automobile. I paid a neighbor who worked in downtown Kansas City to drop me off about 12 blocks from the Star building and pick me up at the same location. My wife was making plans to share a ride to the brand-new Oak Park High School in Kansas City North. We walked more than a mile every week carrying dirty laundry and walked more than a mile home from the laundromat with folded, but clean, laundry. We walked half a mile to the nearest Safeway where we had $20 a week to spend on groceries, laundry supplies, cleaning items -- and an occasional Snickers bar that we could share, one bite at a time.

By the time autumn rolled around, I had a permanent job at the Star, we bought a used Volkswagen Beetle, moved to a "garden apartment" in North Kansas City across the street from the largest bread factory in the Midwest and had enough money to eat out once every two months or so.

Life was wonderful.

That was my first marriage.

It still is.

Neither my wife nor I can find any loopholes in those vows we exchanged on that Friday morning -- all spats, overdrawn checking accounts, frazzled midnight diaper changes, 18 moves in five states and world-class cat allergies notwithstanding.

We're not so young anymore, but we're finally getting the hang of marriage.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.