lazy gal's post

I don't have anything fresh to say today so I'll say something stale. (For me, anyway.)

This column is a couple of years old but I never managed to sell it so I thought I'd give it away here, just because I've always liked it.

A long time ago I stumbled on a news release about research that said: "Couples who laugh together and intentionally reminisce about that shared experience are likely more satisfied with their relationship than couples who don’t have that reservoir of experience to draw on, according to research by an Appalachian State University psychology professor."

At first, the research seemed absurd. I planned to blog and mock it. I don't think I did and that's a good thing, because I remembered it when I wrote this essay.

Marriage of My Unnecessary Discontent

At a luncheon recently, I ran into an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in many years.

“Did you get married? I think the last time I saw you, you were about to get married,” she said.

I laughed. “Eleven years ago!” I replied. “The last time I saw you, I think you were pregnant.”

“My son is 11 years old,” she said. And so we agreed, it had been 11 years since we’d last seen each other.

That night, as my husband and I loaded our dinner dishes in the dishwasher, he mused, “We’ve been together 20 years. This year will be our 15^th wedding anniversary.”

Busted.

Well, I busted myself anyway, and confessed my mistake that afternoon. Tom looked annoyed and I don’t blame him – especially since this wasn’t the first time I’d forgotten how long we’d been married. I forget more often than I remember. Same with the date of our anniversary. I know it was July 4^th weekend, since we married in Dallas and it was the world’s sweatiest wedding. But the only way I can remember the exact date is by remembering 7/6, or ’76 -- the year of my high school graduation – which is evidently better seared in my mind that what most women consider the most important day of their lives.

As for the year – I still can’t tell you without doing some math. Let’s see, it’s 2006, we’ll celebrate our 15^th anniversary in July, so I was married on July 6, 1990. No, wait, that’s wrong -- 1991. I was never any good at math. I am better at marriage than at math, and yet I seem to struggle with that, too.

Am I ambivalent about my marriage?

Actually, I’m ambivalent about marriage in general.

I never thought much about marriage as a girl growing up on the Upper West Side, surrounded by artists and iconoclasts. I yearned for boyfriends, yes. I looked forward to discovering sex, too. But marriage? It just wasn’t on my radar. I didn’t, like so many girls, plan my fantasy wedding, I didn’t imagine the man I’d grow old with (unless John Lennon freed up). I had no visions white picket fences etc. I can’t explain that, except that I always liked to imagine myself different and different people didn’t do anything as bourgeois as marrying. (Besides, like the boys in the Squid and the Whale, I was led to believe that my family was swimming in a sea of philistines and only a certain amount of deprivation and artistic garret-suffering was an admirable life. A happy marriage was simply too cozy for that sort of thing.)

Perhaps I would have given marriage more thought – one way or another -- had I been a product of a divorced home. But in defiance of national statistics, my parents and my husband’s parents are still married to each other – although both sets of parents had a midlife split for a time. (Two years, in my parents’ case, around the time I graduated high school.) In many ways, I took my parents’ marriage for granted.

Yet I also am startled to find myself following in their connubial footsteps.

My husband and have no reason but love and compatibility to stay together. No melancholy experience of broken homes bind us to our vows. We are childless, so no dependents compel us to honor our troth. We both work, so neither of us is entirely financially dependent on the other (though, as a freelance writer, my quality of life would certainly take a hit if I should I be forced to live on only my own income, unless I managed to step things up considerably).

I’m not bragging. I’m puzzled. And, in a very strange way, a little ashamed.

When I read about yet another celebrity break-up, or about a woman with more than one husband in her history, or hear about a couple I know who is splitting, I’m supposed to be saddened, sympathetic, perhaps even a little bit smug. Oddly, I feel none of those things. Instead, I feel inadequate and threatened. Do these people know something I don’t know? Are multiple marriers more discerning than I? More adventuresome? More nuanced in their needs? More … interesting?

I recently read Gail Sheehy’s new book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman, which is full of women my age (47) and older who leave their leaden husbands to discover themselves, or who are abandoned by their husbands, leaving them free to discover themselves and their multi-orgasmic capabilities. Many of these women staunchly reported that weren’t interested in remarriage, that life was better, freer and more fulfilling on their own. And they were getting laid plenty, thank you very much. A few women in the book were married, but they were somewhat more opaque about their lives – protecting their husbands, I imagine.

Or perhaps, like me, they feel funny about staying unfashionable hitched.

Long-term relationships are only theoretically admired in our culture. Healthy ones appear only rarely in film and literature and almost never in pop music, except country (Kathy Mattea’s tearjerker Where Have You Been, Johnny Cash’s transcendent Memories Are Made of This). In popular culture past and present, new love is romantic, frustrated love is romantic, torch carrying is romantic. But long-term relationships are most often portrayed as stultifying, tainted by seething resentments and unspoken disappointments. Love is Jack and Ennis. Marriage is, well, their marriages. Harpies they can’t wait to escape. Disappointment and disillusionment. Ties that bind too tightly.

A couple of years ago, my marriage went through a painful stretch when my husband and I seemed to be careening towards the abyss of divorce in separate cars. To our credit we did (to torture the metaphor) both put the brakes on before it was too late and, with a lot of hard, self-revelatory work, eventually (to now beat it to a bloody pulp) traded our old jalopies for an improved, new-model marriagemobile.

As we worked our way back together, we found ourselves taking an informal and spontaneous months-long inventory of the running one-liners we had collected over the years – those little, inexplicable, you-had-to-be-there inside jokes we had accumulated with our memories and tossed out at appropriate moments.

“IT’S A MULE DEER!”

“That is not possible.”

“Did you WALK to Provincetown?”

“Feels good, though.”

“Pickles and olives in the SAME DISH?”

Nobody gets the jokes and we don’t try to explain them. It doesn’t matter. They belong to us. Each refers to a specific moment and, they are, in a way, the glue that held us together when in other ways, we were breaking apart. “That’s another one,” we’d say, each time one of us tossed one out and we would both smile. These little touchstones represent an important part of what brought us together – similar senses of humor and an ear for the absurd. And they represent history, our irreplaceable shared past.

One-liner by one-liner, Tom and I found our way back to each other. Oh, it took more than that, of course. Counseling. Difficult conversations. Time apart and time together. Determination. Courage. Blind faith. Fear of the unknown. Horror of dating again. (“If we were to break up, this would be our dating pool,” I said to Tom at a Neil Young concert. We looked around at a grizzled crowd of Hawaiian shirts and Mom-jeans and shuddered.)

Maybe I’m just afraid of intimacy. I suppose that’s the easiest explanation for the fight I have with myself not to flee from what most people spend their lives seeking. I’m sure that’s part of it but that’s not all of it. My fear of having a happy marriage is my own personal, inexplicable bugaboo. I push against it continually, even as I settle back into my revived marriage. Besides, don’t America’s divorce statistics tell me that by staying married, we are actually still being a little bit different from the norm? Isn’t divorce as bourgeois as marriage these days? And in what parallel universe do I imagine more happiness alone in a garret than with a man who loves me in a little stone house on three acres? Our marriage isn’t perfect but it has taken us this far, held together with his tolerance for my poor memory, my appreciation for his solidity (and tolerance), and a string of one-liners.

And, the more I think about, the more marriage seems less a solid form, an impenetrable brick fortress than -- like the atoms that make up matter – a dense collection of tiny moments comprising the whole. Marriage is forever, but forever is this minute, and this minute, and this minute and so on and so on for as long as Tom and I still laugh together, still look after each other, still maintain the magnetic field that keeps the moments together. Is that really so scary?

“What is it about us? How is it we’re still married when so many people get divorced?” I mused to Tom as we drove home from dinner at a favorite restaurant, not long after that luncheon where I’d lopped years off our marriage.

“What people?” he said, annoyed again. (And, again, I can’t blame him.) “Most of our friends are married.”

“I know,” I stammered. “But, you know. Celebrities… the divorce rate... so many people …”

“True,” he conceded. “Maybe people aren’t meant to mate forever.”

“I know,” I said, “It makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with us. If we’re …”

“Lazy?” he interjected. I laughed.

“Yeah.”

We fell silent.

Later that night, as often happens, I fell asleep with the television on. I woke several hours later to the blare of some sort of X-games, the commentator shrieking into his mike. Tom awakened at the same moment, fumbled for the remote among the bedding and turned the television off.

“That was really loud,” I mumbled.

He chuckled. “Yeah, it was,” he said.

“Hey,” he muttered before dropping back to sleep. “I was watching that.”

That’s another one.

I smiled into my pillow as I drifted back off myself, feeling loving and loved.

And pleasantly married.