Relativity, Memory, and Twenty Years of Marriage

On a warm fall day, we took the train to Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province in China. It was only the second time I had been there; the first was for a medical checkup. The city bustled, strange and foreign —a blur —as we searched for our destination: the magistrate’s office. We were on a mission—to get married.

Our love was short, but it burned bright. There was no hesitation. Our souls had found each other even though we had been born 6,780 miles apart.

When we finally arrived, there were two lines. One for Chinese nationals, which wound around endlessly, full of young couples, and another for foreigners, which stood completely empty. We followed the signs into a 17th-century structure, which was once a magistrate’s hall under the Qing Dynasty, but was now repurposed as a CCP government office. There was no wait, something very strange in China. Inside, a little old man sat at a red lacquer desk. We hesitated, wondering if this was really the place. It was.

We had expected to pay a few hundred RMB for our marriage certificate, like all the other couples outside. Instead, he asked for 7 RMB—about a dollar. He took our passport-sized photos, collected our paperwork, and then handwrote the certificate himself. It felt surreal. Our life together began with the best $1 I will ever spend. We even wondered if it was real, but that little red book has passed all the tests since.

To celebrate, we went to Pizza Hut. Strange as that might sound now, at the time it was an expensive, high-end restaurant with marble floors. Gosh, it feels like just yesterday.

Einstein taught us that time isn’t absolute—that it bends with motion and gravity, that simultaneity depends on perspective. Physics tells us time is both constant and relative, both rigid and malleable. And I’ve found marriage teaches the same thing. That day in Shijiazhuang was 20 years ago. It feels like a lifetime. It feels like a blink. Somehow, it is both at once. In just a few more years, I will have been married longer than the time I spent unmarried, more of my life with my wife than without her. The mathematics of it still startles me.

But here is the truth I keep learning: life isn’t really measured in years. It’s measured in moments—what physicists might call a series of “nows.” And those nows, stacked together, can feel eternal or fleeting depending on how we hold them. Over two decades, we have lived many lifetimes: the leap of faith in a mixed marriage in China, the move to the U.S., the challenge of bridging two cultures, graduate school and careers, buying a home and remodeling it with our own hands, traveling the world, her doctorate, my books, shared victories and struggles. Each moment is its own present, and memory compresses them into highlights. Looking back, they blur and condense, not unlike the way relativity scrambles time for an observer in motion. To us, twenty years pass in an instant, but within that instant are entire universes.

We have no children, so our marriage is very much just the two of us. That can be terrifying at times, because all of our eggs are in this one basket—each other. But it also makes the time richer, more eternal. Love bends time in its own way. Physics gives time its arrow through entropy: the inevitable increase of disorder. Marriage, though, gives time its arrow through memory, meaning, and gratitude. We can’t go back to that old magistrate’s hall or that Pizza Hut with marble floors. We can’t change the challenges we’ve faced. We can only stand here, in the present, thankful.

The future is uncertain—whether it holds 50 more years or 1 more, whether it brings health or hardship, more adventures or quieter days. But the present moment is ours. It is the only time we can touch, the only time we can shape, the only time that matters. Twenty years together is a blip on the scale of the universe, but for us, it has been an eternity—dense with laughter, trials, milestones, and love. Physics may measure time with clocks and equations, but the heart measures it differently: in gratitude for the nows that fly by faster than we realize.

So today I pause to celebrate not the passage of time, but its bending, its compression, its richness. If Einstein taught us that time is relative, marriage has taught me that love makes it fly.

Cheers!