Thirty Years

Married like that.

We met in 1988.

The first rule of marriage: There is marriage and everything else, and everything else doesn’t count. I’m talking about ‘relationships’, which are basically transitory adventures into self-indulgence or usury depending upon who has the upper hand. But I don’t want to talk about relationships other than marriage other than as bad examples, or things that, depending upon your ultimate needs could destroy some fraction of your married life. That is true even if you’re not yet even married.

You see the difficulty in dealing with jumping over that hurdle and getting married is that most Americans today think that they can survive its dissolution. So when I talk about marriage, the first thing I had to reflect on my thinking about marriage. I asked myself what’s the worst thing that could happen. So pretend I’m giving you advice - with the understanding that I don’t think any woman has ever asked me for marriage advice.

On background, I got married when I was 33 years old. I would guess that between the ages of 16 and 33, what 17 years? I had at least 17 girlfriends. So let that be the unofficial number - and by girlfriends I mean women that I have known intimately in that old Biblical sense. Seventeen Girlfriends is another book. The point is I didn’t marry my highschool sweetheart. I had most every opportunity to be wild and when I turned 30 I was beginning to get bored with breaking hearts, especially my own.

When guys ask me, I tell them to think of the top three characteristics they want in a woman. Presuming they are mature enough to know themselves, they can readily identify these things. And quite frankly I think every man knows ‘their type’. That kind of counts. My type is a look. The look is Zoe Saldana in Lioness. For me ‘my type’ was syrup on the banana split, not the banana or the ice cream. I wanted suave elegance. I wanted smarts. I wanted independent mindedness. So I would say that if you get one out of three, toss her back. That would be a fishing metaphor. If you get three out of three, beware you might be in over your head. That’s a Moby Dick metaphor. Two out of three ain’t bad. Work with it.

You don’t want to be the guy who is always saying “I’m the luckiest guy in the world.” because you managed to get three for three. You want to be the guy who says “We are an effective team.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. When you’ve got two or three out of three the next step is to go through this mental exercise which is via negativa. And I think it’s the more important question that clarifies what one, two, or three out of three means. Think of everything you know about her, especially the negative things. Now imagine the thing you fear most about her. What can you imagine her actually doing that would absolutely devastate you seven years into your marriage? Be honest. You come home and there is that awful, unbearable thing right in your face. Would you still marry her today? Would it be worth it?

See? If you get three out of three, you’d probably be extra vulnerable and then you would be extra destroyed. You’d go psychotic, or maybe - yeah well I never really deserved her anyway. “I should have known.” One out of three, and you would also be saying “I should have known.” Like when the wheel falls off your beater. Yeah whatever. So two out of three is the happiest medium. It worked for me, anyway.

Rule number one in marriage. Don’t question the marriage. This is an ironclad rule. You have to be in it for life. You have to get to the point at which you realize with some finality that you never want to be married with anybody else, ever. Not for the kids’ sake. Not for your family’s sake. For your own sake. For her sake. In other words what you want is not her so much as you want to be married to her. You want to be subservient to the marriage. Questioning the marriage is like making bomb jokes at the airport in Tel Aviv. It’s like climbing outside the balcony railing on the 23rd floor. It’s playing Russian roulette with your own sanity. Don’t question the marriage. Remember you said it would be worth it even if she did that thing.

You have an excuse, the slightest excuse, if you don’t get to seven years. I said you have to get to the point of finality. You have to survive the Seven Year Itch. Every temptation you may or may not have imagined crawls up and down your spine. Lots of things can change in seven years. So rule number two is to survive the itch. Sure you changed. Sure she changed. Sure life has changed in ways you couldn’t predict. So what else is new? Sickness? Health? Richer? Poorer? A more real excuse is a felony conviction, or clinical psychosis, or complete alienation of one or both families. How about a couple miscarriages? How about a devastating car accident? Such things cannot be overcome by attraction or romance. There has to be commitment. The marriage is bigger than you. But marriage isn’t bigger than absolute tragedy. Either way, you don’t come out clean. Just don’t make it from your lack of faith. Don’t reneg because you lost your nerve. Professional counselors have seen enough to know if you’re in a truly tragic situation.

I’ve had the situation when I got to that moment when I told myself I was ready to walk. I had three kids and I thought about giving it all up and moving to Brazil. Just gone. But I looked 20 years into the future and I did it for the kids. Honestly. I could see walking out on my wife but not on my family. So I guess rule three is that when it comes down to it. Marriage is about family. Hers, plus yours, plus both of yours together. That’s the deal. If you don’t want to be family, don’t get married. Sure you can say this year is whatever this year is and marriage changes all the time and it’s what we wanted it to be that’s why we wrote our own vows and blah blah blah. The short metaphor on this is, play the piano etude the way Chopin wrote it, don’t change the notes to make it convenient for you. You can have it your way with relationships. Marriage is marriage. You don’t get to change the rules. You don’t get to play your own notes and call it Chopin. Yeah I know I said don’t do it for the kids, but I didn’t know all of this going in. Eventually, I went all in. I beat the itch.

I think the craziest thing about marriage, at least mine, is that we remain our own people. All that talk about two becoming one. Nope. We’re not joined at the hip or codependent or anything like that. When people asked us about how we remained happy, we decided that the answer was ‘separate bathrooms’. So true. It’s our marriage and we renewed our vows on our tenth anniversary.

Fourteen years in. Working it.

Have a joint bank account. Have your own bank accounts as well. In time, you’ll figure out which one is the financial genius. You’ll figure out which one is the slob. You have to make accommodations for all that. She will want you to kill the spiders and take out the trash and chase away that possum in the backyard. Do it. She never paid attention to changing the oil on the minivan. The engine light came on and it was too late. We survived. Neither of us depended on our parents, we never ran away from each other. There was never a TV show about a married couple that quite got our dynamic. The closest was Dennis Haysbert and Regina Taylor in The Unit. We’re both kind of take charge people. We enjoy being responsible. Heads on straight and headstrong.

The thing to work on is the household, not each other so much. I’m not trying to change her. It’s not going to happen. She’s not trying to change me. It’s not going to happen. It’s about what we can do together, even when we’re in over our heads. We give each other our strengths. That’s why we’re here.

Marriage is public. Take advantage of the fact. Everybody knows what marriage is supposed to be, so you can use the pride to motivate you and the shame to keep your flaky butt in line. Go to the parties together. Throw parties together. Be out and about with your spouse and with your kids. Throw yourself into it, socially. Brave Disneyland. Halloween. Easter. Picture Day. Promotions. Dads & Grads. All that boring middle-class stuff. You are not Brad Pitt. You can’t get away with it. You’re Fred and she’s Wilma. Get over yourself. You’ll always have that one big party with family or the reunion that works and people will remember it for years. This is the time for you to be on the ball. You are the family holding it all together, exhaustingly handling all the chaos. You are a working family. This is the meat of it. Work it.

On the other hand maybe you are like Will and Ariel Durant and are more devoted to your careers than anything else. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t dislike DINKs, but I kind of do dislike power couples, especially if they’re swingers. Too much ego. They are unsubordinated to marriage. Really that’s how marriage works, and I understand if your ego is too big. Like I said, I walked to the brink before I turned 40.

Marriage is about a steady supply of sex from a reliable source. At least it is for men. I’ve got friends. I’ve got the greatest books and music in history. I’ve got my career. I’ve got the entire planet to fascinate me. But I pursue my craving for sex. I’ve got to have it, and I’m restless until my wife knocks me out. Hangry doesn’t even come close. Here’s the thing to appreciate though. Women know more women, and how women think than men do. It’s not until we’re 40 that we realize how much women take our desire for granted. It’s only when we start balding, going pear shaped and huff and puff going up the stairs that our desire doesn’t have the upper hand. Most men know how much work they put in to accommodate whatever that particular woman wants, especially when they play coy. At some point, all women fail to be automatically desirable. We can smell the failure. We have been attuned to functional allure for decades. A mature woman doesn’t sweat it like they used to. Then eventually we fall back to being 12 years old. You’re icky and you don’t play football. That’s when the habits of thought, love and respect take over. Man when you turn 40, you really want to be in a good marriage. Leopard skin pants just don’t work any longer.

What happens in a mature marriage is kind of magical. It happens somewhere around 17 years in, or whenever you get the first kid into college or the service or out of the house under welcome circumstances. Or maybe it happens earlier on that big road trip with all the kids. You kind of breathe and say, we actually did this. We held it together. You start to get that kind of frumpy comfort. You find yourself at a concert with a headliner who was first a star when you were in highschool, like Elton John or Chaka Khan. Or both, in New Orleans at the Jazz Fest.

No we’re not thinking about the kids.

Now you’re on the verge of doing that thing. The last big thing in your life, and you have to deal with health or some kind of inevitably big setback. Me, I got through tax issues, health issues, deaths in the family, down years at work. I survived a lot of shit. But when you get frumpy comfy you are the exact opposite of that scared handsome couple with the adorable kiddies playing it by ear just scraping by. You’re able to comfort yourself and others through panics. You don’t mind looking at each other’s scars, moles and fillings. You can be careful and meticulous with each other, not because you’re trying to ‘keep it new’, but because you can handle just about anything together, including each others’ most annoying habits and those of others. You’ve been keeping your kids away from bad influences. Some of your righteousness is second nature now. It’s a different kind of love. It’s the recognition of having been in love all that time.

We still haven’t buried our parents but we’re watching them become frail and fragile. Maybe we will be like that sooner than they were. But we made a life together. We’re on the other side of the hill with decades of lessons learned, pounds put on, dreams deferred, and piles of middle class junk in the garage. But we never did an artificial Christmas tree. We never threw things at each other. We also follow a rule that our attorney friend Jen said. Don’t ask a question if you think you can’t handle any answer. So there’s no need for deception. We are honest together. We’re individuals apart. We take our own me-time. We are not merged into some co-dependent blob. We have peace, or as I say “Daddy’s house is full of love.” No matter where we wander, we all love coming home.

Tolstoy wrote “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That’s because a proper marriage is about creating a harmonious home, period. The rules are clear, that’s why there is marriage and everything else. Everything else is the work of chaos and disorder, and when you finally recognize that everything else doesn’t matter. Then you understand exactly was does matter in marriage. It’s actually about not compromising yourself. Shakespeare wrote “Tell the truth and shame the devil!”. Proverbs 12:22 says “The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.” So does a happy spouse.

Contentment. Harmony. Respect. & Not Hangry