It occurred to me today that our past is an important part of who we are.

My wife and I have a game that we play together, and we’ve been playing it for years and years. We play it to pass the time, on road trip or in waiting rooms, or as we did this morning, on lazy weekend mornings of rest and relaxation.

The game is called The Memory Game. It involves my wife and I, taking turns, recalling moments from our shared past. Each player starts their turn by saying, “I remember…”, and then recalling whatever they have to recall. The memories might be cute or consequential, mundane or monumental. We usually tend to get into themes, for several rounds, that focus on periods of our history or on other similarities.

More recently, as our children have become able to participate, we’ve started including them in the fun. For them, it’s sometimes quite the challenge, because of their youth and the relative short amount of time that they have from which to draw memories for recall. The themes help the kids, because they can be thinking along certain lines, while other members of the family are taking their turns, to come up with what they intend to use as their next memory. We’ve even made a game out of it, with point totals and such, to try to help the kids to engage in the “fun”.

By bringing the kids in, my wife and I are wanting to have them to be able to recall their shared experiences with the rest of us. It’s always fun to hear one of the kids talk about a memory that they have of something that I would have sworn they didn’t remember. Sometimes, understanding that they remember things that I would prefer that they not remember can be a reminder to me to be cognizant of how I behave as their father.

For my wife and I, the game is a mutual exercise in honoring one of the most important things that we share –> our past.

My wife and I started dating at the end of March in 1994, which means that we’ve been together for over twenty-six years. We’ve been together for more than half of each of our lives. Twenty-six years allows for a couple to make a lot of memories. We have memories of favorite restaurants and favorite television shows, memories of favorite Christmas presents and favorite vacations, memories of the most important moments of our lives, and even memories of some of the least important sections of our past.

That’s part of what any relationship becomes, over time: a combination of shared experiences that contribute to a life lived together

There’s a movie that we own. My wife, assuming that she ends up reading this, will be surprised to hear me mention this movie, because I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned to her the importance of this movie to me.

The movie is called, “Shall We Dance?” (2004), and it stars Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere, and Jennifer Lopez. It’s definitely worth a watch, in case you’ve never seen it before.

Without giving too much away, Susan Sarandon’s character begins to suspect her husband, played by Richard Gere, of cheating on her. She hires a private detective to spy on him, and then she meets with the detective to go over the results of his investigations. During this scene, Susan Sarandon is scared of what she is about to hear from the detective, and she is waxing philosophic about the nature of matrimony and the marital relationship. It’s a great scene.

Susan Sarandon ends up finding out that her husband is not cheating on her, but before she can receive that news, she shares with the detective her philosophy of marriage, in which she says, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Marriage allows for us to have a witness to our lives. Marriage allows that our lives will not go unnoticed because our spouse will be our witness.”

We play the Memory Game, my wife and I, to continue to verify that we have been paying attention to our shared experience together. My wife’s life has been noticed, when it might have otherwise been unnoticed by me, and the converse is also true.

She and I often goof around with each other; she’ll say to me that I could trade my forty-two year old wife in for two twenty-one year old replacements, and I will shoot back that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with two twenty-one year olds. Then, I’ll tell her that she needs to trade me in for a newer model, with fewer defects, and she’ll reply that she doesn’t have the patience to train another husband, having worked so hard to train the first one.

We joke back and forth.

But, truth be told, I can honestly say that I would never cheat on my wife, for many reasons, one of which being that I would never be willing to turn the page on the life that we’ve been sharing together for more than a quarter of a century. I can’t think of any other part of my identity that is closer to the core of who I am than the part of me that is my wife’s husband, my wife’s best friend, my girlfriend’s boyfriend. I have nothing that is more central to being “me” than being with her.

The way that “Shall We Dance?” ends, after the scene that I described above, is touching, if for no other reason than Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere are able to re-fortify their relationship. In fact, at the end of the movie, they are moving ahead, stronger than ever.

The memory game reminds my wife and me that we have shared so many wonderful times together. We’ve shared a multitude of ups and downs, and we’ve been able to cooperate together to create a narrative worth recalling, from time to time. Our past has become one of the most beautiful parts of the story of who we are together.