From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  SR: We did run into one problem because our son-in-law is six feet six, and at the rehearsal, he couldn’t fit under the chuppah. We had to raise it with bricks in order to fit Dan under it.

  CR: Becca wanted a colorful wedding, nothing pale or prissy, and the chuppah was covered with flowers and vegetables.

  SR: I remember most the huge yellow sunflowers. On the day of the wedding, the woman who was decorating the chuppah noticed my vegetable garden, part of which is right out by the road. And she told me to pick something that could hang right in the center of the canopy. Immediately, I knew what I wanted, and picked the two reddest, hottest peppers I could find. In all the pictures you can see the peppers right over their heads as they’re getting married! I thought that was a pretty good symbol.

  CR: I had thrown a lot of parties and I thought I knew what I was getting into. The tent guy’s number is in my Rolodex, so are some band numbers…

  SR:…the hooks to hold up the tent have been in the walls of the house since our wedding…

  CR: But this was different. Fortunately, I had the best in the business helping me: my sister-in-law Barbara, who is a professional events planner, and her best friend Susie Hoskins, who is a caterer. They knew what to do and bossed me around to make sure I followed orders. In fact, Becca couldn’t get over it. Along with my sister, the two of them had been bossing me around since I was born, so I automatically did what they said, which was wise.

  SR: Since Dan’s a Protestant, Becca’s wedding was even more complicated than ours. Both a priest and a minister officiated. The priest had been a great friend of Cokie’s sister and had married our nephew a year or two before, and he repeated a line that has become a favorite of mine: “Marriage is our last best hope for growing up.” He also noted, with engaging modesty, that before he performed his first wedding, his mother had told him bluntly, “You’re a celibate priest, you don’t know the first thing about marriage!”

  Like Lee, Becca wanted a Jewish element to her wedding, but she wanted the tribal elder to be a woman. So she asked our friend Millie Harmon Meyers, who’s known Becca since birth. In Jewish ritual, the groom breaks a glass right at the end of the ceremony, and after Millie placed the glass in front of Dan, she was about to launch into an explanation of the custom. Dan thought it was his cue, so he immediately mashed the glass and everybody yelled out “Mazel tov,” cutting off Millie’s speech. To this day she stands ready to give the rest of it with the slightest encouragement. Later, at the reception, Dan’s great-aunt approached me to tell me why her husband and his brother, Dan’s grandfather, had left Germany together in the mid-thirties. They were actually one-quarter Jewish, she confided, and while they were not raised Jewish, they were considered Jewish under Nazi law, and their father encouraged them to leave and start a new life in America. (No wonder Dan was so good at breaking the glass!) On their way to America, the two young German brothers stopped over for a while in England. On the night they finally set sail, they stayed out late drinking with friends and had to make a mad dash for the boat train. On the platform, a very proper English couple was saying good-bye to their daughters, who were taking the same ship for a holiday. As the Germans came barreling down the platform, the parents warned the girls, “Stay away from those boys, they’re up to no good.” So of course one of them married one of the boys. That was Dan’s grandmother. She had died before Becca and Dan met, but Grandfather Frank was there, at age ninety-four. He’s one of the few men I didn’t enlist to help me hold up Dan on a chair while the wedding guests danced the hora, the traditional Jewish dance. From the moment I realized he and Becca were serious, I started worrying about how we would ever hold this big guy up above our heads!

  CR: After all of the planning, all of the panic, the wedding came off beautifully. Everything was absolutely perfect. The bride and groom left. All of the guests eventually went home. And I felt I had much to be grateful for. At about two o’clock in the morning, when the last of the help was packing away the tables and other equipment…

  SR:…I was already in bed…

  CR: I sat down under the chuppah to say a prayer of thanksgiving. At that moment the sky opened up and it poured. Rain came gushing out of the sky! It had to be God saying, “Just remember, I could’ve done this anytime!”

  Chapter Six

  OTHER LIVES

  BROKEN MARRIAGES

  GETTING DIVORCED

  Divorce is now so common in America that a national publication is devoted entirely to the subject; Divorce magazine was recently started by two former editors at Wedding Bells magazine. How’s that for symbolism? Since almost twenty million people, or one out of ten adults, are now described as “currently divorced” by the Census Bureau, the divorce business is booming. The World Wide Web has more than fifty sites aimed at “generation ex,” from DivorceNet and SmartDivorce to more specialized markets such as California Divorce Guide and Kayama, solely for couples seeking “a Jewish divorce.” An on-line newsletter, Divorce Hot Tips, features “A Teen’s Message to Divorcing Parents” and an article on “When Business Owners Divorce.” Divorcinfo.com promises to help you survive “one of the cruddiest experiences you’ll ever face.”

  They’re right—divorce is almost always brutal—but for all of our devotion to marriage, we understand that not every match is made in heaven, and not every couple can or should stay together “till death do you part.” In fact, according to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, modern American marriages “are more likely to be broken by divorce than by death.” That was not always true. Census figures show that before the Civil War, only one married woman out of a thousand was divorced every year. That rate grew to 8.8 women per thousand in 1940, and while divorce spiked during World War II, when so many men were gone for so long, the rate was still only 9.2 in 1960, on the eve of the country’s cultural upheaval. The divorce rate more than doubled over the next two decades, reaching a high point of 22.8 per thousand women in 1979. Since then it has declined slightly and leveled off, and demographers estimate that if current rates stay steady, 45 percent of the marriages taking place today will end in divorce.

  One reason for this trend is that divorce breeds divorce. As the National Marriage Project puts it: “Divorce is an ever-present theme in the books, music and movies of the youth culture. And real life experience is hardly reassuring; today’s young adults have grown up in the midst of the divorce revolution, and they’ve witnessed marital failure and breakdown first-hand in their own families and in the families of friends, relatives and neighbors.” There are many explanations for the “divorce revolution,” but the principal motive was summed up in an article Steve wrote for The New York Times twenty-five years ago: “Marriage has been caught up in a revolution of rising expectations. People want more out of their marriages than their parents ever did, and in the words of one counselor, ‘They’re not willing to make do, or slide by anymore.’ They also have the time, and the money, to worry about their personal needs in a way that was seldom possible a generation ago. Divorce, in one sense, has become a great leisure time activity.”

  This can be a positive development, particularly for women. In all three cases we write about, wives jettisoned marriages they felt were restricting their growth and individuality. Their words echo the feelings of a woman Steve wrote about in California who said of her husband, “When I went to a shrink I began to break out of the old things. He was one of the old things I broke out of.” At the same time marriage is by definition a partnership, and nothing can poison a relationship faster than selfishness—from either partner.

  For most of our history, society discouraged divorce, but in many ways the reverse is now true. New laws in many states make divorce easier, and legal-service programs make divorce more affordable for poor families. The stigma once associated with divorce is now totally gone, to the point where people are almost too eager to discuss their most intimate experiences. We received a two-page Christmas letter from a woman we barely kn
ew who wrote in great detail about her husband’s infidelities and concluded: “I am grieving the end of a twenty-five-year marriage that has [put me] in a pit of deception and disrespect. Thank you for allowing me to use you as a release and to move on.” If the divorce business is booming, the singles business is even bigger, offering clubs and cruises, menus and mortgages, for people without partners.

  Religious strictures against divorce have also lost authority, and Roman Catholics split up almost as often as the rest of the population. Then there is simply the pressure of constant adjustment and anxiety. When couples find themselves living in new neighborhoods, performing new jobs, learning new technologies, marriages can shatter under the weight of uncertainty. In his book Future Shock, published back in the 1970s, Alvin Toffler predicted that rapid change would create “temporary marriages,” different relationships for different stages of life. We’ve altered some names and places in this chapter, but the stories are real, and they show that for many Americans, Toffler’s prediction has come true.

  Bernie and Carol Tobin: “I Left My Husband for Myself”

  Carol Tobin can pinpoint the day that her marriage collapsed. It was in the early spring of 1994. After work she went out and got her hair dyed, and when she arrived home at seven-thirty, she was greeted by a famished and furious husband. “I was treated like a child,” she recalls. “He was mad, he was yelling at me, and I said, ‘This is it, screw you.’” She got in her car and started driving with “no idea, none” about where to go. She thought about getting a room for the night, but worried that her husband would see the bill and get angry all over again: “I had the feeling as I was driving, how am I going to pay for this without him breathing down my neck? Isn’t that weird?” But after a while, Carol remembers, “I had this big surge of freedom. Like wow! I did this! It was the greatest feeling on earth, just to get in the car and say, ‘I don’t have to take this crap anymore.’” With her courage cranked up, she finally stopped at a motel: “I was shocked, I felt everybody was looking at me because I was by myself.” Once inside her room, she looked at herself in the mirror and asked: “Why me? Why couldn’t I be treated the way I wanted to be?”

  She returned home the next morning, but a week later Carol asked her husband, Bernie, to leave their house. “I felt like I had walked through a brick wall,” he remembers. It’s now more than five years later, both Tobins are in their early fifties, yet their divorce is still not final. They’ve both found other partners, but strands of memory and regret keep them tied together, almost against their will. “I admit it, I still love him, and probably I always will,” says Carol. “When you meet someone and you’re seventeen years old and he’s number one in your life for many, many years…” After a pause, she adds: “I lived a very fifties marriage, I lived my parents’ marriage. But it’s the nineties.”

  Carol and Bernie met at a high-school graduation party in the spring of 1966. Her father had died a few months before and her brother, being protective, had agreed to play escort. She saw a guy with big dimples and a bright smile across the room and turned to her brother and said, “I’m going to marry him.” Her brother, according to family lore, suggested that meeting him first might be a good idea. “I made the first move,” Carol recalls. “I sat down on his lap and said, ‘Hiya, cutie.’”

  Bernie was two years older, an accounting student who had spent his childhood living above the family hardware store in a poor section of Queens. But as the business prospered, the Tobins had moved to a better neighborhood. “We had a backyard,” says Bernie, “and I made friends who had a lot more than I had at the time.” He left the party with a tall blond shiksa. But Carol and Bernie lived only a mile apart, and when they met again at a bus stop a few weeks later, they talked on the ride home. He asked her out to a Ray Charles concert and they were married two years later. “He was everything I wanted in a man,” says Carol, “and that carried over for most of my life.”

  Carol wanted kids quickly—“she was very adamant about it,” says Bernie—and through her twenties she was happy to stay home with Peter and Nicole. Bernie’s accounting career flourished and they moved to a comfortable Long Island suburb. But when she hit her thirties, Carol’s attitude changed: “I was a mommy pretty early in life and I got to the point where I said, ‘What about me?’” She’d dropped out of college after a few months and now her lack of education started bothering her: “I had a very high IQ and I said, ‘This is ridiculous, do something with your life.’” Bernie agreed that Carol had “a terrible image of herself” and supported her plans to go back to school. “I paid for the whole thing,” he notes. “I even paid for Nicole to be in the preschool program at the college.” When he asked her where she wanted to go, Carol said jokingly, “Berkeley.” But the answer revealed her growing sense that she had missed out on something important: “In the sixties when I should have been swinging, instead I was married.”

  Carol settled for a local college. At first, she’d take Nicole with her, and after her daughter started school, she remembers that “we’d all sit at the table and do homework—I miss those times.” Then she fell under the influence of her sociology professor, a gay black man from the Deep South: “He took this white Jewish girl and opened my eyes to a world I knew nothing about.” She read feminist writers like the novelist Toni Morrison and recalls: “I really thrived in college, and I couldn’t go back to being Bernie’s little girl anymore.”

  The normal domestic battles grew louder, the atmosphere in the house turned frigid, but somehow Bernie missed the signals. “I really didn’t see a change in her,” he says, but he does remember adjusting to his wife’s new schedule: “I got a girl in to clean house for her every week and we’d eat out more often so she didn’t have to cook.” After graduating with honors in only four years—“I was very proud of myself”—Carol tried law school. She never finished but took jobs in and around the court system. One involved counseling women involved in divorce cases and she thinks now that the job contributed to her growing restlessness. She wondered how she could advise women who “had the ability to leave when I didn’t.”

  Bernie insists that “all the things she wanted, I was all for,” including her work: “I felt it would be tremendous if she had a career and brought in some bucks. That meant more dollars we could save.” In Carol’s view, Bernie was too much the accountant, always focused on saving for retirement, and that he used money to dominate their relationship. She wanted to move to a new house at the beach, to put “life back in our marriage,” but the guy who grew up living above the store said they couldn’t afford it. “It really killed me, I felt locked out of the marriage,” she says. “What I tried to do was reverse the roles. I begged him, let’s do something different, and when he said no, I couldn’t forgive that. He put me on the same level as my children.”

  Yes, Bernie now agrees, he did use money at times to control his wife. But there were also times when “she was really controlling herself,” asking him permission to spend money when she always had “the same access I did” to their joint accounts. When Carol’s father died, he had left her mother impoverished, and Bernie believes the experience scarred his wife and turned her into a “tightwad.” Whatever the cause, one thing is clear: money was at the root of the Tobins’ problem. “We had a very big misunderstanding in that area,” says Bernie. Carol adds: “His thing was power and money. He had both over me and he still does.” But she also thinks she bears some of the blame: “I had twenty-five years of anger, and I let it happen. If I had stood up to him earlier, I probably would have saved the marriage.”

  Money was one issue, sex another. Carol says that she had a “purely platonic” relationship with a man in the neighborhood, a fellow who fixed the family cars. But she insists that she “didn’t see him romantically” until after Bernie left the house. Bernie is convinced she’s lying, that the affair started before he was tossed out. “When I married her, she was a virgin,” he says, “and part of the reason we broke up is
that she wanted to sow her oats.” He recalls a conversation they had a few months before he moved out: “We were getting into bed one night and she said to me, ‘Bernie, I think you should have an affair.’ I was startled. I asked her, ‘Carol, what are you saying?’ But now my shrink says that she was actually asking my permission for her affair.” Bernie has it wrong, his wife retorts: “I didn’t leave my husband for another man, I left my husband to find myself.” In fact, she says, she’s only been with two men in her entire life, her husband and her current lover, and her words carry a trace of regret: “I’m still the little girl who wants to go to Berkeley. Now, when I could swing, I can’t do it.”

  By the time Bernie moved out, their son, Peter, was long gone from home, but their daughter, Nicole, was still in high school. “I definitely wasn’t a happy camper,” she says of her father’s departure, “but at the time I thought that if it stops the fighting and the screaming, then why not? You can only escape so far. No matter how much time you spend outside the house, you still have to come back in at some point and sit down at a dinner table where there’s tension and nobody’s looking at each other and that’s not pleasant.”

  But if his daughter was relieved, Bernie was devastated. He wanted to keep the life he knew: “We had two sports cars, a nice home in a nice area, we had clothes, we went on two cruises a year. We lived right and we still saved.” Then he adds about Carol: “I was crazy about her, I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to stay.” He sank into an “awful depression” and explains: “I couldn’t understand what was happening.”

  Neither could Nicole: “My dad moved out and my parents dated each other for a while. He’d come over, he’d sleep over. It was pretty weird, but I just tried to go about my daily life and pretend it wasn’t happening. They were always in this on-and-off relationship.” Bernie says Carol “had me on this merry-go-round emotionally. I would come back for a day or two, I’d be on an up, and then I’d be down again, down and depressed.” The tranquilizers he was taking made the depression worse, and thoughts of suicide slowly began building up over a period of months. He started hoarding pills.