Word that means married but also includes pre-marriage relationship?

First, some background. My wife and I dated for 9 years before we got married. We've been married 19 years, so we've been together for a total of 28 years.

I am running for my local school board and needed to come up with a candidate statement to be printed in the voter guide. There is a strict limit of 200 words for the statement, so brevity is critical. I listed my quantitative qualifications as bullet points, including my relationaship with my wife, a 25-year veteran public school teacher.

When I have the luxury of being more loquacious, I would write/say something like

My wife — we've been together for 28 years — is a 25-year veteran public school teacher.

which indicates we're married (my wife) but also specifies the total length of the relationship (the use of together implies that it is not 28 years of marriage alone). If we had been married the whole time, I could have simply referred to her as my wife of 28 years, but that is not the case.

For the more taciturn statement, however, I need something shorter.

Now, the whole being married thing is not significant to me, but there are voters, even here in San Francisco, who view unmarried couples as less valid or even immoral, so when running for office, since we did actually get married, I might as well include that. But I also wanted to highlight that we had been together for the whole of her career and even before she went into the classroom.

So, is there a word or very short phrase that implies being married but also includes the time of the relationship prior to getting married (both dating and engagement)?

I checked for synonyms of married, but they all refer strictly to the post-marriage period. I also tried the synonyms of together, but didn't find any that really applied well to a relationship, let alone specifying the period before and after marriage.

I ended up leaving out the pre-marriage time in favor of specifying that we're married:

19 years married to a 25-year public school teacher

What I would have liked to have said was:

28 years _____ with/to a 25-year public school teacher

where the missing word would have included the notion of being married but not exculively so.

Any thoughts? I would also be open to rewording the statement as long as the word count is basically the same.

While this might be mostly curiosity on my part at this point, I will need to do another candidate statement in four (if I'm elected) or two (if I'm not elected) years.

As specified, the phrase

28 years with my spouse, a 25-year public school teacher.

succinctly notifies the reader that (1) you're married and (2) you've been in a relationship with your current spouse for 28 years.

Just say married for 19 years to a public school teacher. Otherwise, you’re drawing attention to a completely irrelevant part of your life story, and you can count on it coming up in the ugliest and most unfair way. Everything in political life must be simple first and nuanced later, if at all.

This isn’t about word choice. It’s about how you structure your narrative.

I think you could say

My wife and life partner of 28 years ...

Formally it could be misinterpreted by logically bracketing "wife and life partner" as a pleonasm, inferring a 28 year marriage, but that seems unlikely. If anything, this juxtaposition of "marriage" with "life partner" indicates something more substantial and committed than an arbitrary relationship which carries over into the marriage, an accent which I like.

The order is essential: "life partner" comes after wife so that the "28 years" refer to it, even though the temporal order is reversed.

I'm not aware of any word that explicitly means married or living together.

The term common-law implies living together without actually being married. But you can't use that because it would include only the pre-marriage state and you'd be no better off.

If you don't care about mentioning marriage specifically, you could just say:

28-year relationship with a 25-year public school teacher.

Almost everybody would assume it was a romantic relationship. And while it doesn't only mean common-law or marriage, it's a common assumption. (It could also be qualified with committed.)

However, it sounds like you do want to mention marriage for the sake of the voters, so your original version may be the best you can get in the short amount of space.

The OP might want to try the following version the next time he is running for election.

The emphasis is on the cohabitation with a school teacher, which hints he is all too familiar with the day-to-day problems a veteran teacher faces.