(Both laugh)
M: He seemed older.
N: I have all the ignorance of a man ten years my senior.
M: I thought you looked older. (Laughs) Let me rephrase that—it wasn’t that he looked older, it was that he was so dang manly. And I was used to dating these boyish gay guys. He also has a very mature disposition.
N: (Laughs) I have to giggle at that accusation.
M: Most of the time.
N: (Fart noise) It’s funny; people in our circle—just a few—said things to me when we were getting into it. Things like, “Are you sure the age difference isn’t going to be an issue?” And, “Are you OK with Megan being such a massive breadwinner—and you being a sometime actor/carpenter?” And I said, “Who cares? We’re in love.” (Laughs)
M: But back to your perceived age—for the many years we were first together, I think we even looked about the same age. Maybe we still do-ish. I don’t know. But that helped with other people’s potential judgments.
N: There’s a lot on social media, too, especially when we work together as actors. People have often said of Ron and Tammy that they can’t believe I’m not the older one from looking at us.
M: Issues around age are so ingrained in our culture, and it’s not healthy. But can we talk about an aspect of this that is so lame? Younger people who think older people are gross. It’s insane! What do they think is going to happen to them? Anyone who subscribes to that cult of youth is a fucking idiot, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a hilarious lack of foresight in the most basic possible way imaginable.
N: It’s like the health care issue. All the healthy people are like, “I ain’t paying into that shit!”
M: Should we talk about children versus no children?
N: Sure. We don’t have children.
M: Wait, we don’t? What are those little furry things running around on the carpet?
N: Those are dogs.
M: Now you tell me.
N: I come from a big family. I have three siblings, and the extended family in the tri-county area—that’s Grundy, Kendall, and Will counties in Illinois—it’s a family of public servants and salt-of-the-earth farmers, nurses, schoolteachers, librarians, paramedics. Everybody has two to four kids. That was my machinery, that was what I was set up to achieve. “I’ll get married, and then I’ll have some kids.”
We tried for a couple of years. And it didn’t work out biologically.
M: We didn’t start trying until we got engaged, so I think I was forty-three. So it was a little late. And it was a bit of a two-sided affair, because Nick didn’t have the trillions of sperm one might have hoped for.
N: Let’s put that . . .
M: Let’s just call that . . . Nick doesn’t have enough sperm. Nick has a low sperm count.
N: Let’s put that on the back cover.
(Both laugh)
N: Is it cool if we blurb our own book?
Like so many things about our unlikely matchup, on paper, the cold cognitive reasoning—sometimes if one partner wants kids and the other doesn’t, then the relationship doesn’t work out.
M: Are we breaking up?
N: Well, let’s finish the book.
M: (Laughs) Let’s get paid first.
N: We took a swing at it. Some of our friends were going through very intense in vitro at the time, and it was kind of fortunate that we had a firsthand account of their experience. It probably saved us a few trips to the experimental laboratory.
M: Well, with that issue I personally kind of feel like if it’s meant to be, it will happen.
I felt like “if I’m meant to get pregnant, I will.” And I didn’t. I also never had a burning desire to have children, which is a crazy taboo thing to say. You’re just supposed to want to have nineteen children no matter what. The whole mommy thing started to ratchet up about fifteen or twenty years ago, when every tabloid was like, “Jenny’s baby bump!” or whatever. And I thought, “What the fuck is going on?” But that’s simmered down a bit. Conversely—so I guess I was ahead of the curve (Laughs)—in a lot of countries around the world, people are not having enough sex and not having enough children. Denmark, Germany, a couple of other countries of note. But I personally just never had that innate longing. I think it came from a lot of things. Just a simple fear of the actual process of childbirth. What it does to your body, and the pain. I think it came from wanting to stop the bloodline. (Laughs) And the other thing is just a genetic disinterest in it. I didn’t have that mother lust that many women have.
But when I met Nick—I’d been married before, and one time I thought I was pregnant, and I was PRAYING that I wasn’t. And that’s not right. If you’re in deep enough to marry someone, you shouldn’t be desperately frantic to get your period. It definitely might indicate that you’re not married to the right person. But when I met Nick, I thought, “He’d be such a great father.” So we tried for a couple of years in a really relaxed way, but it didn’t happen. Things happen the way they’re supposed to happen. And Nick has—how many?—maybe five other families scattered across the Midwest . . .
N: I think maybe six . . .
M: So that helps. But because of work, over the years, we’ve turned to each other and said, “What the fuck would we have done if we had had children?” Well, I probably wouldn’t be saying “fuck” as much as I do. That’s one thing.
N: We would have been those parents who say “fuck” a lot.
M: Yes.
N: I think you were leading into the fact that we were seeing other friends around us having to juggle kids with acting jobs, and knowing the hours we work, especially on a TV series, and the amount of traveling and constant relocating involved . . .
M: It wouldn’t have been good.
N: We would not be present.
M: We would have foisted a child or two off on nannies, which isn’t something we wanted to do. We’ve looked at each other over the last ten years or so and said, “There’s no possible way that we could have had children and done as much as we’ve done in our careers.” We’ve decided that our work is our public service. Or it isn’t something we’ve decided, it just is. And that’s sort of our baby.
N: We could have sold off our children, like Rashida, who every couple of years would pop out a bun, and it would be handily sold on the black market.
M: Rashida sells children? I didn’t know that. She’s really kept that on the down-low.
N: It’s a great bloodline, so she makes a pretty penny.
M: I would imagine.
We did have a woman once—a woman we didn’t know very well—offer to have a baby for us. To be a surrogate for Nick and me in exchange for a large amount of money, which she named. I had never asked her about it, or even indicated that we wanted to have children. It made things extremely awkward between the two of us thereafter. After we politely declined her offer.
N: Yeah.
And that, dear reader, is “Age Difference.” Feel good?
M: Yeah.
One perhaps underappreciated key to any healthy and successful household is a properly apportioned, full set of practical skills. Sometimes domestic partners will have these talents in equal shares, and in other instances the lion’s share will have been awarded to one of the spouses in extreme disproportion. So long as the combined attributes balance out to one whole well-oiled machine of a living space, and both participants are satisfied with their fair share/lack of competence and the accompanying responsibility, then a state of relative bliss can be maintained indefinitely, or so says me.
Let’s examine my parents, for example, despite the discomfort this unsolicited attention might cause them as modest Midwesterners. I have known these people for nigh on fifty years at the time of this writing, and in that time I have seen them nimbly juggle four children, five grandchildren, three consecutive houses with sizable yards, a c
ouple of dogs, innumerable cats, and two respective professional careers, all in pretty impressively good cheer. For part of that time they fulfilled more traditional roles, what with my dad bringing home the bacon while Mom reared us cubs up to an age where we could operate a zipper (sixteen years old, in my case), whereupon she went to work as well.
With some ebb and flow through the years, my parents have split up most of the chores pretty fairly. They are both very competent bakers and cooks, providing us with agreeable provender with an astonishingly regular consistency when compared to (at least my own) more modern eating habits, which involve a lot of eating out and ordering in. Mom is generally in charge of the oven, and Dad masters the charcoal grill, but the cooking is frequently shared out between them, even within the same meal. I am hard-pressed to think of too many jobs around their home that aren’t shared to some degree. Mom reigns over the décor, the laundry, the sewing, mending, and the interior cleaning, but Dad is a good helper. Dad sees to the garden and the yard, and tends to any task requiring a tool greater than a screwdriver, but Mom is quick to help rake the leaves. However, there are always interesting deviations from tradition, probably in any couple, and my folks are no exception. Mom, a small, gentle, downright elfin lady, was generally in charge of corporal punishment when we were kids, while Dad baked bread every Sunday and taught us to shoot free throws. You just never know, when human nature is involved. Their equanimity, to my way of thinking, has to have played an imperative role in the success of their child-rearing (four for four!) and accomplishments in each of their places of employ—Dad’s a retired schoolteacher and Mom a retired labor-and-delivery nurse, both lauded for long careers of exemplary service.
In our house, things are quite a bit different from the Offerman vibe I was accustomed to, due to our freakish lifestyles. Megan and I both have very fortunate careers as performers in film, television, theater, stand-up, books, and music, which require us to maintain a very malleable set of roots, as it were. We love our beautiful home in Los Angeles, but we can each receive a call at any given moment with a swell gig either in town or, conversely, in some far-flung location. In the last year, jobs have seen us scampering off to Great Britain, South Africa, Atlanta, Vancouver, Boston, Kentucky, and the Grand Ole Opry. We both enjoy touring as well, Megan with her (the best) band (in history) Nancy And Beth, and me in my capacity as a humorist, and sometimes we’re even lucky enough to tour together. This is the main reason that we instituted our two-week rule early on in the relationship.
Even when we’re living at home for long stretches of time, our filming/woodworking hours can be quite demanding, not to mention all of the other crap that comes with these jobs, like publicity and fittings and glue-ups and so forth. Of course, we are well compensated for a lot of our work, which allows us to be spoiled rotten, which brings me back to an examination of the domestic competence in our particular household.
I’ll start with Megan, who is very much the curator of our living experience. Among Megan’s superpowers, one would have to include her skills as an interior designer. She literally created our home from the skeleton of the house we bought and stripped down to the studs, with the help, of course, of some very skilled tradespeople who were not the guy typing this sentence. It is sincerely a masterful work of art. It is best viewed from the far corner of the swimming pool, all lit up at night, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask our sweet friend Chris Pratt. Whoops, let me pick up that name I just dropped. Together we marveled at the vision she applied to every detail of the place, resulting in a terribly evocative whole, one night as we lounged in the twilit water sharing a cigar (not a euphemism).
This Shangri-la is somewhat available for your perusal in the January 2017 issue of InStyle magazine, and I should mention that Megan is greatly assisted in this effort by our pal Ames Ingham, a talented professional designer who is able to hook up Megan with “the good shit.” So we have this beautiful and cozy living space with luscious art and fabrics (and the occasional woodwork!) that is further enriched by Megan’s adherence to a very Zen “no clutter” policy. She laid this discipline on me when I first moved in with her some eighteen years ago, and I immediately recognized its calming value. Megan made our house amazing, and together we keep it neat and tidy, which subtly but consistently mollifies the chaotic energy of our schedules.
Furthermore, my wife, the curator, chooses the linens for the bed, as it turns out that you can purchase different types of sheets, sorted not just by mattress size but also by quality. What the F? There is a thing called “thread count” that I still can’t quite wrap my head around despite a great love of arithmetic, and I thankfully don’t have to because my bride has that shit on lockdown. All I know is that damn near every time I slide under the covers of our bed, it feels so good that I laugh, long and loud, at the pleasure.
Her artistic eye also extends to my wardrobe, which is another great service to our overall competence. I have always been quite capable, and still am, of choosing the necessary duds to wear to work at my woodshop or on a hike. Beyond those occasions, I simply pick out my clothes using the rules of thumb that Megan has imparted over the years (brown shoes with blue suit; don’t tuck in that flannel shirt; shoes and belt always match; bowler and porkpie hats are never OK, despite how damn cool I think they look; et cetera) and then walk in to where she can see me and ask, “Is this OK?” and based upon her responses and my limited ability to learn, I’m proud to share that my batting average has improved considerably.
As I mentioned earlier, our intense schedules require us to be fed pretty regularly by other hands, and we enjoy the luxury of services that deliver quality meals that are healthy and custom so that we can maintain our focus on jigsaw puzzles and their subsequent photography sessions for Instagram. When we do have occasion to sully the kitchen, I am the one who dons the (very cute, denim) apron and fires up the stove or grill. I really enjoy it for the satisfaction of successfully following/deviating from a recipe to create something delicious and pleasing to me and my bride, and sometimes our friends for dinner parties, but I also really feel the touch of my parents when I’m in the kitchen, thanks in part to the fact that I’m often frantically texting with them while I cook. They are very patient with me.
I also represent the Offerman camp well when it comes to fixing things. I command the drawers of tape, wire, epoxy, and hardware, and I can’t help but feel the tiny thrill of the challenge whenever Megan asks, “Can you fix this?” She is also quite competent with her fingers (nailed it), but my years in the shop have given me the edge when it comes to tinkering. We have both been guilty of sewing on buttons or mending/patching ripped clothing, and I am thrilled that in the midst of this sometimes fancy-pants lifestyle we have retained the ability to whipstitch.
What I want to drive home is that in order for a marriage to succeed, the participants have to bend and be able to pick up the slack for each other, depending upon the proclivities of each spouse. Maybe one likes to rise early and one is more nocturnal, so the early riser is often tasked with business correspondence that wants to be delivered in a timely fashion, whilst the night owl will often surprise the farmer upon his rising with the large amount of work she achieved after midnight. It’s all a dance, and if one dancer is clumsy and wears a thick mustache, then the other gorgeous partner must use her grace and flexibility to compensate and cover so that the steps may be completed satisfactorily, until the climactic final lift, when his worth is suddenly revealed and fully on display as he lifts her above his head, displaying for all the world to see the swan who loves him for his simple ability to carry luggage, withstand physical pain, and grill a chop of lamb.
Our house is very different from the one in which I matriculated, but I daresay that the domestic competence of Megan and me is not dissimilar from that of my parents. We are two pairs of lovebirds, doing our level best using what talents we have to add something to the world rather than destroy it. Megan and I make
art of one kind or another, and my mom and dad have made so much produce that I cannot begin to list it here, and I’m not just talking about a shitload of cucumbers, although they are certainly guilty of that charge. With modest means, they have made a handsome home full of love, where good manners are the rule of the day but laughter is also encouraged. With their quiet dance in Minooka, Illinois, they made me, for crying out loud, and my three siblings, who have proven to be the estimable citizens Mom and Dad had in mind, and then some.
In the midst of our whirlwind activities (I’m typing this in a London hotel while Megan is engaged in a press junket for Will & Grace), it’s easy to look upon my parents’ well-tended yard and suspect that their comparatively quiet grass is a mite greener than my own, but I imagine that my family might say the same about our California lawn. Whatever the case, I am just grateful that they taught me to do the dishes and that I found a lady who likes that.
Megan: Uh-oh. Next subject: religion.
Nick: I don’t really have anything to say . . . (Laughs)
M: You’ll be pretty quiet on this topic. I’ll be doing all the talking.
N: That’s like church and stuff? (Laughs)
M: Yeah, basically.
N: Oh boy. I grew up Catholic. My mom and dad are still probably two of the best members of St. Mary’s Church in Minooka. They’re a great example of how people can use religion in a healthy and positive way. They do it right. They don’t ever talk about it.
The Greatest Love Story Ever Told Page 9