by Jen Doll
• • •
The kitchen is the comma in the middle of my parents’ house, itself punctuated in the center with an island, a sturdy block of granite-topped wood. It’s here that my mother chops, cuts, mixes, tells my dad he’s not chopping or cutting or mixing properly, and instructs the family in the art of candle-lighting, wine-opening, table-setting, vinaigrette-making, pasta-shell-stuffing, relationship-maintaining, and, most of all, in the dark magic of keeping up one’s own side of a conversation even if no one else has anything interesting to say. The kitchen itself is airy Florida architecture: tall ceilings, gold-yellow walls, polished cabinetry, countertops with black-and-gray marbling, and numerous windows to let in the sun, which almost always shines. The room is form as well as function, and the objects within it adhere to that mantra. My mother adheres to that mantra. My mother is a benevolent dictator, usually, and her throne is the kitchen.
She would not consider this in any way sexist. This is just the way it is. She’s chosen it, and if you do wrong in her domain—where there is no KitchenAid, but recipes are filed neatly in a brown wooden box I’ve known since childhood and shelves are stacked with spices arranged to her particular needs and tastes, labels facing front!—you will be exiled. She moves easily from thing to thing, stirring a pot, tasting the soup and pronouncing it delicious, moving leftovers to a smaller container and fitting the old one neatly into the dishwasher. All of it is under her control, and she smiles as she shares again how Brad, as a child, told her she looked like a “microwave mom” but she sure didn’t cook like one. She is secure in this, in her cooking ability, her mom ability, her wifehood, herself, just as she is in the martini my father mixes each night at six p.m. and she drinks, with a glassful of ice next to it to add as needed. “Cocktail hour,” my dad will say, though when Brad and I are home it goes on for much of the night. My dad makes my mom her drink, and then he pours his own, and if we are there, too, he asks what we’d like and serves it. He always makes my mom her drink first, but that day in the winter of 2010 we were not there, and it was the first of many in which no drinks were made at all.
• • •
There’s one wedding that most of us never get to attend, and yet it’s one that impacts us in the most fundamental of ways. That, of course, is the wedding of our own parents. Yes, I’d seen the photos and heard the stories of that day, but I wanted to delve deeper into the fabric of my mom and dad’s relationship. Beyond how they met or wed, why did they choose each other? What were the parameters of marriage for the time in which they met? How did they view their own union as well as the overall institution, and how do they see those things now? What did they think about the relationships of their own parents, or even their grandparents?
I talked to them individually about these and other questions, and the conversations that ensued were some of the most revealing discussions we’d ever had. Just as we all have wedding stories, each family has its own intricately woven marital anthropology. There are amazing discoveries to be found with some digging. My dad told me of one of his first memories of his grandparents, who, when he was a little boy in the 1940s, drove him in their Ford V-8 out to a plot of land they owned in the country for a picnic. “I remember pasture land and trees and country,” he said. “They were walking hand in hand. It was a very nice day, and a nice, loving type of relationship they seemed to have.”
My parents were married in 1969, at a time when having a wedding by a certain age came as pretty much a given. My dad explains it frankly: “That was just what people did.” There was no question in his mind as to whether he should marry or not. He went to college, he got a job, he had a car and an apartment. At twenty-eight, he’d accrued all the right things for the next stages in life—marriage and then starting a family. This was how it worked. As for choosing whom he’d marry, “it was a searching-out process,” he said. “You look around and see who might be a good match. You don’t want to get stuck with baggage, an anchor, someone with beliefs you don’t share. You want to know what their families are like.” That’s not all that different from how people approach finding a partner today, though of course the hows, whens, and even ifs as related to the searching-out process have changed.
So, why my mom in particular? “We had fun together,” he said. “We liked going out, having dinner, having a few drinks. We would get together with our other friends and do things . . .”
Compare that to the tale of my mother’s grandparents’ road to marriage. Great-Grandpa had lived in a boarding house, and the woman who ran it had a niece back in the old country. “Whoever would pay her passage from Italy could have her as a bride,” my mom recounted. He did, and they married and had four children, though it was said they never got along. “They must have gotten along sometimes!” said my mom.
Marriages today are expected to be about far more than getting along. We want more than the marriage certificate. We want that other thing, too, the thing we can’t put a finger on, though we know it’s passionate, romantic, soulful, cosmic, fulfilling, and individualized to our own couplehood, so somehow utterly unique. As for how we obtain it, the messages are confusing and often contradictory: We’ll know it when we see it; we can’t force it; we have to put ourselves out there and go after it; timing is crucial; it never comes when we’re looking for it; we just haven’t found the right person yet; if we don’t know what it is, we’ll never find it.
“Wait, what about love?” I asked my dad about his courtship of my mom.
“Oh, of course there was love,” he said, as if surprised by the question. “Love and romance and all that. I guess you’d say that clinched it.”
When she was a young girl, my mother was introduced to the boy who would become her first husband. As they grew up, they started to date. He was a marine, and they wrote letters to each other while he was away. When he came back, she’d graduated from high school, and he proposed. She got married at nineteen, at a time when most of her girlfriends were married and some of them were already having kids. My mom’s desire to wed had been practical, too, not only because it was what was expected, but also because her parents fought “like cats and dogs,” and she wanted to get out of the house. “It was 1964. I didn’t go to college,” she told me. “If there was money for anyone to go to college after high school, it would be for my brother. As a woman, you were meant to be a housewife. At times, I thought, it would have been great if I had a couple girlfriends to live with—like you did after college—and work. But girls typically got married, or they ended up spinsters, or they lived at home with their parents and took care of them.”
My mom’s first marriage lasted five years. They had not been able to have children, and when her husband brought up the topic of divorce, that had been part of his reason for why: “Well, we don’t have kids.” Divorce had not been in her plan. Though it was becoming more common, it wasn’t “what people did.” My mom did want children, and she also wanted to understand why her husband no longer thought their marriage was worth having. “Things were not the greatest, but I didn’t think they were bad,” she explained to me. He refused to go to counseling, and the relationship continued to dissolve. “I got to the point where I told him, ‘If this is what you want, do it, but I’m not going anywhere,’” she said. She stayed in the house, and he left, taking the car. Soon afterward, he served her with divorce papers.
As a newly single woman, suddenly her whole life was different. She had a job and, with the help of an attorney, got the car back. She sold the house and rented an apartment, where she lived on her own—though her mother was worried enough about that to insist she put “M.” on the mailbox instead of “Ms.” A few weeks after her divorce was final, she met my dad. They started dating, but given what had happened with her first marriage, she wasn’t eager to jump right back into another. She took a trip to Hawaii with her sister, and they met men and partied and flirted and had what sounds like an utterly fabulous time. When she got
back, my dad, who thought the vacation would help her get singlehood out of her system, kept doggedly returning to the topic of marriage. This was to her dismay. “I said, ‘I’m really not ready for this. We get along, why should we ruin things?’” she recalled.
Of course, she did eventually say yes. Flash forward to that pivotal scene at the top of the revolving restaurant in Chicago and his repeat query, “Why won’t you marry me?” When I asked her what had made her change her mind, she quipped, “Because he bought me a diamond wedding band, and I couldn’t get out of it!” In truth it was more romantic and also more pragmatic than that. She might not have wanted to marry again immediately, but she had the keen sense that she shouldn’t give him up. “I thought he was the right one,” she said. “He seemed to be a steady person who had a lot of good values, and we spent some time talking about what we wanted out of life.” Considering her fertility history, she thought it was only fair to tell my dad that she might not be able to have kids. He was not concerned that she’d been married previously, and he wasn’t concerned about this, either. “Oh, we’ll have kids,” he assured her. Her agreement to marry him came approximately six months after their first meeting. The wedding followed shortly thereafter. Seven years later, so did I.
The marital takeaway could be seen as such: Just find a decent person with good values, someone with whom you get along, can communicate, and most of all, want essentially the same things out of life. (Prior to this discussion, of course, you must be able to express what those things are.) He asks and you say yes, even if at first you balk, or laugh, or request a diamond wedding band. Or maybe you ask, and he agrees. The years go by. You manage through the inevitable trials and enjoy the anticipated happinesses, and you emerge to find yourself still together, going on your forty-fifth wedding anniversary.
It sounds blissful, and maybe a little bit basic, but in reality it’s never quite so easy. That kind of perseverance, and the initial leaping-off point, too, can seem even more difficult when getting married is not the only path we might take, or “just what people do.” A lot of what we think we want, and are allowed to want, has changed. The marriage question is so complex for many of us today precisely because of the increasingly open-minded world in which we have been lucky enough to be brought up. In many cases, we have as many options as our parents dreamed of giving us. But as what we want becomes less codified and the paths we might take divide and multiply, the risk of choosing wrong can grow scarier than the risk of not choosing at all—especially when we don’t have to choose.
The common-sense searching for a partner my father described doesn’t seem like quite enough. We can have so much more, or so much less. We all know of healthy, supportive marriages, and we know of bad ones, too. If we knew, really knew, how to make sure we’d have the former and not the latter, maybe the decision to marry would be easy. But how do you know you know? What if you think you know, and then you’re wrong? It’s never easy.
My parents divided their roles in their marriage pretty traditionally. Though my mother worked when she met my dad and for several years after they married, when she had children she transitioned to being a full-time mom, staying at home and taking care of my brother and me. As long as I can remember, she went to the gym regularly, played racquetball, and volunteered for charity organizations, as well as maintaining a close group of friends and a most un-momlike sense of humor. I recall a day in what must have been a series of many that my brother and I were home from school, perhaps due to snow. Mom went to the garage, ostensibly to get something, but more important, to get a short respite from us. Brad followed her to the garage and knocked on the door. “Mom!” he yelled. “MomMomMommmmmmm!”
She opened the door. “I’m not your mother,” she said to her dumbfounded son. “I look like her. I talk like her. But I’m not her. She’ll be back in a little bit.” She shut the door and, I’d guess, laughed hysterically while Brad circled back to me, his eyes wide, to share the story.
My dad, on the other hand, was the man who didn’t have to stay home with the kids, taking garage breaks as needed. He was the breadwinner, a sometimes workaholic. He was the “fun dad” on weekends; Mom was the disciplinarian, the one you didn’t dare cross. And, mostly, that worked for them.
Sometimes it didn’t. “There were times when I thought he was spending too much time at work, and I wanted him to spend time with not only me but also you and Bradley,” my mom said. “I’d go to the school and other husbands were there, and I’d tell him, ‘You’re missing these times.’”
Later, when Brad and I were in college, Dad spent more and more time at work in increasingly important management positions. I remember a family vacation in Turkey one summer when it seemed like their marriage was on the thinnest of ice, melting under our feet. “I was playing the career role more than the husband role, and Mom felt neglected. And maybe she was, because my mind was elsewhere,” he says of that moment in their relationship. I remember a time after that, when they first moved to Florida and were coping with taking care of my ailing grandmother; how hard that was, not just for them as individuals but for them together. They stuck through both of those crisis points, and others, including some I surely don’t even know about.
As my dad told me, “Marriage is a process. It’s the journey, not the destination.”
My parents have provided an enduring example of how to be with someone through the bad and good of a marriage, and why it’s worth it to do so. Their relationship, like anyone’s, has had its ups and downs, but it felt enough like an accepted, comfortable reality that I could take it for granted, so much so that as a kid I’d deliver those bratty censures to my mother for having the audacity to have had a first husband. As I grew up I came to know friends whose parents were separated and divorced, whose moms or dads had remarried, who had extended families with stepbrothers or sisters or both. There were all these different ways of living, I realized, and many of them worked, and some did not. One truly bad iteration was the couple who stayed together and took their unhappy marriage out on their kids. It occurred to me that even though my mom and dad weren’t exactly the Cleavers (thank God), I’d had it pretty good.
Yes, we’ve had it good, my brother and I. Yet we haven’t married. We can wait as long as we like to walk down the aisle and as long as our bodies will let us to have children, if we decide to do either of those things at all. While we may be judged by a few people, prolonged singlehood is by no means the social end it once would have been. In fact, waiting to marry, for some at least, has clear benefits, allowing men and women to finish college and establish careers, thereby gaining maturity and building a stronger foundation for later together-lives. There is a class divide to note, though. Highly educated women who choose to wed later in life tend to have happier marriages and fewer divorces (they are, it’s said, the most married group of women in America), but they do pretty well on their own as singles, too. Single women who are poor and less educated, on the other hand, often benefit greatly from marriage in earlier adulthood, particularly if they have children. And, of course, everyone benefits from a relationship that is good and stable. But whether people need to be married to have “goodness” and “stability” is another discussion. It’s worth noting, too, that views of marriage are different around the world. In Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway, for example, cohabitation and marriage have become largely interchangeable, albeit with a twist: Those cohabitation arrangements are often the more lasting unions.
My own lack of a wedding up to this time comes with an array of possible reasons, among them, well, no one has ever (seriously) proposed. But I think there’s more to deciding to marry than having someone ask and responding with a yes. Maybe I just haven’t “met the right person,” and maybe that’s partly my own doing. I believe we directly or indirectly set up the situations that lead to marriage for ourselves, and thus far in life, I have not actively pursued it as a goal. I live in New York City, su
rrounded by people my age and older who are frequently unmarried and younger people who almost always are. The social and financial reality that means I don’t have to marry is surely a factor in my singleness, as are what may be impossibly high standards for what I want marriage to be like if I do. Timing, too, has been important. I have not reached that moment in a relationship in which I’ve really, truly wanted someone to propose, nor that moment in which I would propose to someone else. While it would be difficult to convince me that I should have married any of my past boyfriends—hindsight being twenty-twenty, of course—there’s also the fact that the focus of my life up to this point has simply not been marrying and starting a family.
At the same time, I don’t want to cancel out those options, either.
We all have our priorities. I look at my friends and see two groups: the women who have married and had children, and the women who have found themselves, after years of work, at the top or nearing the top of their professions. Both groups have happiness, I think; both are indisputably admirable for what they’ve achieved, but there’s a rare person in the mix who has managed to do it all, that itself not without its own sort of compromise. After all, that’s what life is so frequently about: choosing one thing and in that choice foregoing the other. Even if we believe that “having it all” is the wrong goal—who can fit “it all” in a studio apartment that doesn’t even hold a queen bed?—we still don’t want to narrow the field so that things we might find we want someday, if not now, are crossed off the list and become impossible. For some of us, it may be that the option of having it all is far more important than actually obtaining it. We don’t want to regret any choices made or not made, but in our daily, busy lives, our most immediate focus is often not marriage and children and what we hope for in the far-off but ever-approaching future. Tasks like getting a raise, a better job, and a great apartment are feasible to accomplish with some effort and in a certain accessible time frame, while goals like “being in love” or “finding the right one” at “the right time” feel capricious and very hard to achieve in any strategic, structured manner. So maybe it’s not surprising that we often devote ourselves to the former.