Though the human heart may indeed be shot through with bottomless desire, and while the world may well be full of alluring creatures and other delicious options, it seems one truly can make clear-eyed choices that limit and manage the risk of infatuation. And if you’re worried about future “trouble” in your marriage, it’s good to understand that trouble is not necessarily something that always “just happens”; trouble is often cultured unthinkingly in careless little petri dishes we have left scattered all over town.
Does all this sound excruciatingly obvious to everybody else? Because it was not excruciatingly obvious to me. This is information I really could’ve used over a decade ago when I was getting married for the first time. I didn’t know any of this stuff. And I am appalled sometimes to realize that I stepped into matrimony without this piece of useful data, or without very many pieces of useful data at all. Looking back on my first wedding now, I’m reminded of what so many of my friends say about the day they brought their first babies home from the hospital. There is this moment, my friends report, when the nurse hands over the infant, and the new mother realizes with horror, “Oh my God—they’re going to send this thing home with me? I have no idea what I’m doing!” But of course hospitals give mothers their babies and send them on home, because there is an assumption that motherhood is somehow instinctive, that you will naturally know how to care for your own child—that love will teach you how—even if you have zero experience or training for this towering undertaking.
I’ve come to believe that we all too often make the same assumption about marriage. We believe that if two people really love each other, then intimacy will somehow be intuitive to them, and their marriage will run forever on the mere power of affection. Because all you need is love! Or so I believed in my youth. You certainly don’t need strategies or assistance or tools or perspective. And so it came to pass that my first husband and I just went ahead and got married from a place of great ignorance and great immaturity and great unpreparedness simply because we felt like getting married. We sealed our vows without a single clue whatsoever about how to keep our union alive and safe.
Is it any wonder that we went straight home and dropped that baby on its fuzzy little head?
So now, a dozen years later, preparing to enter marriage again, it seemed like some more mindful preparations might be in order. The silver lining to the unforeseen long engagement period offered to us by the Department of Homeland Security was that Felipe and I had a luxurious amount of time (every waking hour of the day, actually, for many months on end) to discuss our questions and issues about marriage. And so we did discuss them. All of them. Isolated from our families, alone together in remote places, stuck on one ten-hour-long bus ride after another—all we had was time. So Felipe and I talked and talked and talked, clarifying daily what the shape of our marriage contract would be.
Fidelity, of course, was of primary importance. This was the one nonnegotiable condition of our marriage. We both recognized that once trust has been shattered, piecing it back together again is arduous and agonizing, if not impossible. (As my father once said about water pollution, from his standpoint as an environmental engineer, “It’s so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it’s been polluted.”)
The potentially radioactive topics of housework and domestic chores were also fairly simple to address; we’d lived together already and had discovered that we shared these tasks easily and fairly. Similarly, Felipe and I shared a united position on the subject of ever having children (to wit: thanks, but no thanks), and our concordance on this massive subject seemed to erase a textbook-sized volume of potential future marital conflict. Happily, we were also compatible in bed, so we didn’t foresee future problems in the human sexuality department, and I didn’t think it was smart to start digging for trouble where none existed.
That left just one major issue that can really undo a marriage: money. And as it turned out, there was much to discuss here. Because while Felipe and I easily agree on what is important in life (good food) and what is not important in life (expensive china on which to serve that good food), we hold seriously different values and beliefs about money. I’ve always been conservative with my earnings, careful, a compulsive saver, fundamentally incapable of debt. I chalk this up to the lessons taught to me by my frugal parents, who treated every single day as though it were October 30, 1929, and who opened up my first savings account for me when I was in the second grade.
Felipe, on the other hand, was raised by a father who once traded a pretty nice car for a fishing pole.
Whereas thrift is my family’s state-sponsored religion, Felipe has no such reverence for frugality. If anything, he is imbued with a natural-born entrepreneur’s willingness to take risks, and is far more willing than I am to lose everything and start all over again. (Let me rephrase that: I am utterly unwilling to lose everything and start over again.) Moreover, Felipe doesn’t have any of the innate trust in financial institutions that I have. He blames this, not unreasonably, on having grown up in a country with a wildly fluctuating currency; as a child, he had learned to count by watching his mother readjust her reserves of Brazilian cruzeiros every single day for inflation. Cash, therefore, means very little to him. Savings accounts mean even less. Bank statements are nothing but “zeroes on a page” that can disappear overnight, for reasons completely out of one’s control. Therefore, Felipe explained, he would prefer to keep his wealth in gemstones, for instance, or in real estate, rather than in banks. He made it clear that he was never going to change his mind about this.
Okay, fair enough. It is what it is. That being the case, though, I did ask Felipe if he would be willing to let me handle our living expenses and manage our household accounts. I was pretty certain that the electric company would not accept monthly payment in amethysts, so we would have to work out a joint bank account, if only to handle the bills. He agreed to this idea, which was comforting.
What was even more comforting, though, was that Felipe was willing to use our months of travel together to very carefully and very respectfully—over the course of those many long bus rides—work with me on setting the terms of a prenuptial agreement. In fact, he insisted on it, just as much as I did. While this might be difficult for some readers to understand or embrace, I must ask you to please consider our situations. As a self-made and self-employed woman in a creative field, who has always earned my own living, and who has a history of financially supporting the men in my life (and who still, painfully, writes checks to my ex), this subject mattered dearly to my heart. As for Felipe, a man whose divorce had left him not only broken-hearted but also quite literally broke . . . well, it mattered to him, too.
I recognize that whenever prenuptial agreements are discussed in the media, it is generally because a rich older man is about to marry yet another beautiful younger woman. The topic always seems sordid, a distrustful sex-for-cash scheme. But Felipe and I were neither tycoons nor opportunists; we were just experienced enough to recognize that relationships do sometimes end, and it seemed willfully childish to pretend that such a thing could never happen to us. Anyhow, questions of money are always different when you’re getting married in middle age rather than youth. We would each be bringing to this marriage our existing individual worlds—worlds that contained careers, businesses, assets, his children, my royalties, the gemstones he had been carefully collecting for years, the retirement accounts that I had been building ever since I was a twenty-year-old diner waitress . . . and all these things of value needed to be considered, weighed, discussed.
While drafting a prenup might not sound like a particularly romantic way to spend the months leading up to one’s marriage, I must ask you to believe me when I say that we shared some truly tender moments during these conversations—especially those moments when we would find ourselves arguing on behalf of the other person’s best interests. That said, there were also times when this process turned un
comfortable and tense. There was a real limit to how long we could discuss the subject at all, before we would need to take a break from it, change the subject, or even spend a few hours apart. Interestingly, a couple of years later, as Felipe and I were drafting our wills together, we encountered this exact same problem—an exhaustion of the heart that kept driving us away from the table. It’s dreary work, planning for the worst. And in both cases, with both the wills and the prenup, I lost track of how many times we each uttered the phrase “God forbid.”
We stayed with the task, though, and got our prenuptial agreement written under terms that made each of us happy. Or maybe “happy” isn’t exactly the right word to use when you’re conceptualizing an emergency exit strategy for a love story that is still only at its beginning. Imagining the failure of love is a grim job, but we did it anyhow. We did it because marriage is not just a private love story but also a social and economic contract of the strictest order; if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be thousands of municipal, state, and federal laws pertaining to our matrimonial union. We did it because we knew that it’s better to set your own terms than to risk the possibility that someday down the road unsentimental strangers in a harsh courtroom might set the terms for you. Mostly, though, we pushed through the unpleasantness of these very awkward financial conversations because Felipe and I have both, over time, learned this hard fact to be incontrovertibly true: If you think it’s difficult to talk about money when you’re blissfully in love, try talking about it later, when you are disconsolate and angry and your love has died.
God forbid.
But was I delusional to hope that our love would not die?
Could I dare to even dream of that? I spent an almost embarrassing amount of time during our travels ticking off lists of everything that Felipe and I had going in our favor, collecting our merits like lucky pebbles, piling them up in my pockets, running my fingers over them nervously in a constant search for assurance. Didn’t my family and friends already love Felipe? Wasn’t that a meaningful endorsement, or even a lucky charm? Hadn’t my most wise and prescient old friend—the one woman who had warned me years earlier against marrying my first husband—completely embraced Felipe as a good match for me? Hadn’t my hammer-blunt ninety-one-year-old grandfather even liked him? (Grandpa Stanley had watched Felipe carefully all weekend the first time they met, and then finally cast his verdict: “I like you, Felipe,” he pronounced. “You seem to be a survivor. And you’d better be one, too—because this girl has burned through quite a few of ’em already.”)
I clung to those endorsements not because I was trying to collect reassurances about Felipe, but because I was trying to collect reassurances about myself. For exactly the reason so frankly stated by Grandpa Stanley, I was the one whose romantic discrimination was not entirely trustworthy. I had a long and colorful history of making some extremely bad decisions on the subject of men. So I leaned on the opinions of others in order to prop up my own confidence about the decision I was making now.
I leaned on some other encouraging evidence, too. I knew from our two years already spent together that Felipe and I were, as a couple, what psychologists call “conflict averse.” This is shorthand for “Nobody Is Ever Going to Throw Dishes at Anyone from Across the Kitchen Table.” In fact, Felipe and I argue so infrequently that it used to worry me. Conventional wisdom has always taught that couples must argue in order to air out their grievances. But we scarcely ever argued. Did this mean we were repressing our true anger and resentment, and that one day it would all explode in our faces in a hot wave of fury and violence? It didn’t feel that way. (But of course it wouldn’t; that’s the insidious trick of repression, isn’t it?)
When I researched the topic more, though, I relaxed a bit. New research shows that some couples manage to dodge serious conflict for decades without any serious blowback. Such couples make an art form out of something called “mutually accommodating behavior”—delicately and studiously folding themselves inside out and backwards in order to avoid discord. This system, by the way, works only when both people have accommodating personalities. Needless to say, it is not a healthy marriage when one spouse is meekly compliant and the other is a domineering monster or an unrepentant harridan. But mutual meekness can make for a successful partnering strategy, if it’s what both people want. Conflict-averse couples prefer to let their grievances dissolve rather than fight over every point. From a spiritual standpoint, this idea appeals to me immensely. The Buddha taught that most problems—if only you give them enough time and space—will eventually wear themselves out. Then again, I’d been in relationships in the past where our troubles were never going to wear themselves out, not in five consecutive lifetimes, so what did I know about it? All I do know is that Felipe and I seem to get along really nicely. What I can’t tell you is why.
But human compatibility is such a mysterious piece of business anyhow. And not just human compatibility! The naturalist William Jordan wrote a small, lovely book called Divorce Among the Gulls, in which he explained that even among seagulls—a species of bird that allegedly mates for life—there exists a 25 percent “divorce rate.” Which is to say that one-quarter of all seagull couples fail in their first relationships—failing to the point that they must separate due to irreconcilable differences. Nobody can figure out why those particular birds don’t get along with each other, but clearly: They just don’t get along. They bicker and compete for food. They argue over who will build the nest. They argue over who will guard the eggs. They probably argue over navigation, too. Ultimately they fail to produce healthy chicks. (Why such contentious birds were ever attracted to each other in the first place, or why they didn’t listen to their friends’ warnings, is a mystery—but I suppose I’m hardly one to judge.) Anyhow, after a season or two of strife, those miserable seagull couples give up and go find themselves other spouses. And here’s the kicker: often their “second marriage” is perfectly happy, and then many of them do mate for life.
Imagine that, I beg you! Even among birds with brains the size of camera batteries, there does exist such a thing as fundamental compatibility and incompatibility, which seems to be based—as Jordan explains—on “a bedrock of basic psycho-biological differences” which no scientist has yet been able to define. The birds are either capable of tolerating each other for many years, or they aren’t. It’s that simple, and it’s that complex.
The situation is the same for humans. Some of us drive each other nuts; some of us do not. Maybe there’s a limit to what can be done about this. Emerson wrote that “we are not very much to blame for our bad marriages,” so maybe it stands to reason that we should also not be overly credited for our good ones. After all, doesn’t every romance begin in the same place—at that same intersection of affection and desire, where two strangers always meet to fall in love? So how can anyone at the beginning of a love story ever possibly anticipate what the years might bring? Some of it really has to be chalked up to chance. Yes, there is a certain amount of work involved in keeping any relationship together, but I know some very nice couples who put heaps of serious labor into saving their marriages only to end up divorced anyhow, while other couples—no intrinsically nicer or better than their neighbors—seem to hum along happily and trouble-free together for years, like self-cleaning ovens.
I once read an interview with a New York City divorce court judge, who said that in the sorrowful days after September 11, a surprisingly large number of divorcing couples withdrew their cases from her purview. All these couples claimed to have been so moved by the scope of the tragedy that they decided to revive their marriages. Which makes sense. Calamity on that scale would put your petty arguments about emptying the dishwasher into perspective, filling you with a natural and compassionate longing to bury old grievances and perhaps even generate new life. It was a noble urge, truly. But as the divorce judge noted, six months later, every single one of those couples was back in court, filing for divorce all over again. Noble urges notwithstandin
g, if you really cannot tolerate living with somebody, not even a terrorist attack can save your marriage.
On the subject of compatibility, I often wonder sometimes, too, if maybe those seventeen years that separate me from Felipe work to our advantage. He always insists that he’s a far better partner to me now than he ever could have been to anybody twenty years ago, and I certainly appreciate (and need) his maturity. Or maybe we’re just extra careful with each other because the age difference stands as a reminder of our relationship’s innate mortality. Felipe is already in his midfifties; I’m not going to have him forever, and I don’t want to waste the years that I do have him locked in strife.
I remember watching my grandfather bury my grandmother’s ashes on our family’s farm twenty-five years ago. It was November, upstate New York, a cold winter’s evening. We, his children and grandchildren, all walked behind my grandfather through the purple evening shadows across the familiar meadows, out to the sandy point by the river’s bend where he had decided to bury his wife’s remains. He carried a lantern in one hand and a shovel over his shoulder. The ground was covered with snow and the digging was hard work—even for such a small container as this urn, even for such a robust man as Grandpa Stanley. But he hung the lantern on a naked tree limb and steadily dug that hole—and then it was over. And that’s how it goes. You have somebody for a little while, and then that person is gone.
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