How to Write Your Love Story, Properly, Before the Details Blur
You have told the short version at dinner parties for twenty years. The short version is not the story, and the details underneath it are already blurring.
There is a version you tell at dinner parties. It takes ninety seconds, it has two jokes in it, and it has been sanded smooth by two decades of retelling. It is a good story. It is also, at this point, a summary of a summary, and there is a real risk that it is the only version that survives.
Your children have never known you as anything but parents. The idea that you were once two nervous people trying to work out whether to bet on each other is genuinely unavailable to them, and it is one of the more useful things they could have.
Write it separately first
This is the single most important instruction on this page. Each of you writes your own account before either reads the other's.
The accounts will not match, and the mismatch is the best material in the entire project. One of you remembers a decisive conversation the other has no memory of. One of you was certain months before the other. The dinner-party version has quietly resolved all of that into a single agreed narrative, and the disagreement is more interesting and more true.
What to write, in order
Step 1Who you were just before
The month before you met. Where you lived, what you did all day, what you were worried about, who you were seeing or not seeing. This is the part that gets skipped and it is what makes the meeting mean anything. Without it the story starts with two people who have no lives.
Step 2The actual meeting, in detail
Not the summary. What was said, who spoke first, what you were wearing, what you thought at the time as opposed to what you say now. Include the unflattering part, which there always is. Almost nobody's real first impression matches the family version.
Step 3The part where it could have not happened
Every couple has one. A missed call, a job in another city, somebody else, a fight in the first month. The dinner-party version has usually removed it entirely because it complicates the shape, and it is the most valuable thing in the story.
Step 4When you each knew
Write your own date and your own moment. Do not agree on one. Two different moments is the truth and it is far better reading than a jointly agreed anniversary of certainty.
Step 5The first hard year
Money, family, a move, a loss. Every marriage has an early stretch that tested it, and leaving it out produces an account your children cannot use. They are going to have one of their own and it will help enormously to know that you did too.
Step 6What you would tell yourselves then
Written separately, again. This is the closing section, and it is the part your children will read twice.
What to do if one of you will not write
Extremely common, and it is nearly always the husband. The usual outcome is that the wife writes the whole thing and the finished account has one voice in it, which is a real loss, because the interest was always in the two versions sitting next to each other.
Interviewing him is the fix, and it works far better than nagging. Ask the questions out loud, write down his answers in his phrasing, and read them back. Almost everybody who will not write will talk, and a spoken answer transcribed faithfully is indistinguishable from a written one on the page.
What does not work is writing his section for him from what you remember. It reads as one voice with a costume on, and your children will notice.
When the marriage has had a serious rupture
An affair, a separation, a period neither of you wants written down. This is the question that stops a lot of couples partway through, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a cheerful one.
You are not obliged to publish anything. It is your marriage. But an account that runs smoothly from a wedding to a fortieth anniversary with nothing difficult in it is not a gift to your children; it is a standard they will quietly measure their own marriage against and conclude they are failing.
The workable middle is to name that there was a hard stretch, say roughly when, say what it cost, and say what brought you through without detailing what happened. That is honest, it is not an exposure, and it does the thing your children actually need it to do.
Get the physical things in too
The photograph you both hate. The ticket, the note, the receipt from the restaurant. Most couples have three or four objects from that period and they carry more than a page of description. Photograph them and put them in alongside the writing rather than leaving them in a drawer.