by Ada Calhoun
We undergo just a few major transitions in our life—from nonexistence to existence at birth, from nonparent to parent, from existence to nonexistence at death. We don’t get to pick our parents or our children. Marriage is the one transition that’s completely under our control.
Some Native American ceremonies use blankets to mark these new realities; as you are covered by a blanket when you are born and when you die, so when you marry you and your spouse are covered by one.
“Ritual can be a sacred drama of our fondest aspirations: what we were, what we are, and what we hope to be—not just measured by the meagerness of our own life’s experience, but inscribed in a ritual script that we inherit from the many generations that came before us,” says Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman. He likens ritual to the raft that takes you from one side of a river—one phase of life—to the other. “Ritual provides the exclamation points for our lives, more than it does the periods. Ritual is the wrapping that makes even the most outrageous ideals believable.”
One of the Old Testament readings available for Catholic weddings is from the Book of Tobit. Sarah has been married to seven men, but to each for less than a day. Every wedding night, her husband has died. Finally, though, she marries Tobiah, and that night he wakes her up and insists that they get out of bed and pray together for mercy. He asks that God “allow us to live together to a happy old age,” and God does. Was that all it took to keep Sarah from being widowed again—a man finally saying out loud that he wanted her forever, and making her wake up and say it out loud, too?
Neal and I have lived in the same Brooklyn apartment for the past ten years, and nearly every day of that decade we have said hi to our neighbors down the block, an older couple. They have children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They sit out in front of their apartment in a two-person swing and talk to people walking by. We joke that when Oliver was young, he thought his name was Qué Lindo (How Cute), because that was what they said when they saw him.
Not long ago, the old man found an injured baby pigeon while he was walking their also-very-old dog, Brownie. He brought it home and tended to it, and it grew into a happy, healthy, full-sized pigeon. Still, it didn’t fly away, but stayed with the old man. It sat outside with him during the day and at night slept in the couple’s bedroom; his wife, seeming rather exasperated by their new roommate, covered the floor with newspaper. They let Oliver name the pigeon. He called her Veronica.
No one seemed to fully understand the man’s obsession. One afternoon when their grown son was visiting, he said, “Dad, how about we get rid of this bird?”
“How about we get rid of you?” the man said.
This went on for months. Then one day the couple on the swing looked upset, and by their side sat only Brownie.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “Where’s Veronica?”
“The neighbor’s dog . . .” the old man said, tears in his eyes.
His wife held his hand, looking so sorry for her bird-besotted husband that she seemed to mourn the very creature she’d once considered a bane.
“Those dog owners will have to move,” Oliver said as we walked on toward the playground. “I don’t think anyone in the neighborhood will be able to forgive them.”
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” writes James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time. He uses the word “love” “as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
If Neal slurps his soup one more time, I might pick up the bowl and throw it across the room, but we remain just as married as spouses who leave love notes in each other’s briefcases. Marriage has a leveling effect, just like death. On the Titanic, the earls went down with the stewards.
My grandmother is ninety-nine years old. She was married to my grandfather for sixty-one years, until he died. When I was visiting her recently, I asked her, during a lull in our Scrabble game, how they stayed together for so long.
“Well,” she said, “back then no one thought about leaving. It just wasn’t done.” She knew one couple that split up. “The wife waited for the kids to be grown and then ran off. The husband is in a nursing home now, alone, and he still talks every day about his wife and wonders why she left. He was completely blindsided. Is there anything sadder than that?”
Did my grandparents, who always seemed so together, ever have hard times? “Of course,” Grammy said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more open. I was scared of being too close. He wanted to talk about everything. He’d even ask me questions about how I felt, and still I kept everything in.” (In her defense, Norwegians aren’t known for their emotional availability.)
“So what’s the secret to staying together?” I asked her.
“Be nice?” she offered.
I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don’t leave. That’s all.
My right knee has started to hurt pretty much all the time. Some days, walking down stairs makes me feel ancient.
“You’re collapsing into varus,” the doctor told me when I went to have it checked.
“That sounds existential,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“You have bad arthritis in your knee and you’re getting a little bowlegged,” he said.
The second and last time I ever went skiing, in my teens, I tore an ACL. It happened on a black diamond slope when, trying to keep up with my cousin Jeremy and a friend of his, I fell. Surgery to fix my knee failed. And so as I’ve walked and walked through one city after another, I’ve worn out my knee. I wish I could take back some of those blocks so I could use them now.
“You’ll need a knee replacement eventually,” the doctor said, “but try to wait as long as you can, because we only do it once and the new knee only lasts twenty years, so if you did it now, you’d be in a wheelchair by sixty.”
I’m getting deeper wrinkles around my eyes. With luck, I will go to seed slowly, but my halest days are behind me. Neal and I have been there for each other’s appendectomies, broken bones, and various other physical indignities. We will face more of that in the years to come. When I visited him once after a surgery, I brought him an obscenely large cat balloon that made him laugh, and an electronic solitaire game that he played for hours in a fog of painkillers, not winning once. When he stood next to me while I had a C-section, he saw my eyes fill with tears like two little swimming pools when we heard Oliver cry for the first time. Neal stood up in front of both our families and said he would love me until we die, and I may end up holding him to it.
When I ask long-married couples if they’ve faced any major problems in their marriage, they often surprise me with long lists. One said: “We’ve been married over ten years and have survived job losses, losing everything in the recession, a newborn almost dying and being in the NICU, a sudden out-of-state move, a child revealing sexual abuse—nuclear effing bomb dropped there—my husband getting a rare form of leukemia, almost dying and shuttering our business because of it. All within a five-year period.”
Another person: “Twenty-three years married, and a shitton of crises: health, finance, child gone bat-shit crazy, addiction, sexual dysfunction (his), abortion (mine), depression . . .”
Maybe along with the standard wedding presents, we should be given a bingo card, with squares for stressors both major and minor: babysitters quitting with no notice, not being able to make a rent payment, hospitalizations. Then we could see suffering as a game: “Look, honey, we got bingo diagonally—anxiety disorder, a relative in jail, unemployment, an affair—and all before our fifteenth anniversary! The Joneses took twenty years to bingo, but they did have the rare combination of teenage pregnancy and house fire. Good game, Joneses.”
“To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise,” writes psychologist Erich Fromm. “If love were only a feeling, there would b
e no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?”
“When you fall in love, it doesn’t feel like a choice,” a friend of mine says. “It feels like fate. And so then when the passionate love cools in your marriage, it’s hard to feel like that’s not fate, too. It’s hard to remember that letting yourself fall in love with this person and marrying them was a choice, and loving them again can be a choice, too.”
A woman whose husband is in a psychiatric ward for the seventh time since they were married, twenty-one years ago, told me:
I feel like I didn’t sign up for this. I had no idea. I agree that marriage is a commitment. I’m not just staying in it because of that, because I made a promise. I’m staying in it because he’s a good father and I have hope. But it sucks being a single mom. He was in the hospital for Hurricane Sandy. It’s tough. My mom’s not feeling so well. But I guess I do feel like I have hope and I feel like I have an obligation to him. He never asked for this.
“I just can’t do it anymore,” a friend said over the phone. She was furious with her husband, who she felt resented her for being chronically ill. But he wasn’t saying she was a burden, I pointed out. Couldn’t she just own it until she was better? Like, “Yeah, I’m a burden! Can’t do a thing about it. Please get me some water?” She would take care of him if he were sick, I pointed out.
“But, honestly, I don’t know if I would have been able to,” she said. “He’s a better person than I am.”
“Well then,” I said, “there’s something you can both be grateful for in the middle of all this: that you’re the one who got sick, not him.”
A woman who lives in a small town in the middle of the country tells me she fell hard in love with her husband the first moment she met him in a bar, and that in those early days they couldn’t keep their hands off each other: “We dripped so much candle wax in our bedroom messing around that the clock next to the bed looked like a vampire’s.”
Three years later, they moved into a big house and quickly had two children. “My husband calls those the salad days,” she says. They had good jobs, good kids, a good house. But the good times didn’t last. She developed postpartum depression, and then bipolar disorder, and then had an affair: “I was at home with two toddlers, whispering into my cell phone while my boyfriend whispered right back from his basement, so his wife wouldn’t hear him.”
When the affair ended, she was plagued by guilt:
I had sinned. I couldn’t wash off the awful things I’d done. I had nearly destroyed my little family. I couldn’t let it happen again. So I ate. I ate to stanch the guilt I felt at how disappointed my late father would have been. I ate so my husband wouldn’t chase me around the house anymore asking for sex. I ate so no man would even take a second glance at me, but instead would avoid looking at a physically distorted obese woman with a pretty face. . . . And yet—he stayed. He stayed with me through the cheating, through the depression, through me mutilating my body with food, all the while threatening to leave him, as if he didn’t have reason enough to leave me at any minute. He stayed, and he loved me, a broken person with a broken brain.
Last night I woke up at two a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. I took a Tylenol PM and lay down on the couch, staring at the Halloween decorations, Oliver’s backpack, the pile of papers on the table. The ceiling fan spun the dollar-store bats in wobbling arcs around the room. The fish filter hummed. In the kitchen, the coffeemaker was preset, its blue light glowing with promise.
When I was a girl, I sometimes slept with a row of pillows in bed with me, imagining the pillow-man as a real person. I fantasized about sharing a bed. I dreamed of beds in farmhouses, in apartments and in tents, in the country and in the city. I wanted company and intimacy, understanding and warmth. Now I have those things, and only sometimes do I catch glimpses of how good I have it.
When Oliver was younger and would climb into bed with us at dawn and go back to sleep for an hour until the alarm went off, I would feel fortunate and peaceful, lying there in between my husband and my son, half-asleep and half-awake, half-hoping the sun would never rise. But most days, I see only the homework undone, or the dishes unwashed, or the floors unvacuumed.
If I’d left Neal the various times I’d considered it, I’d have other things now—probably other men, other apartments, different sounds out the window. But on Tylenol PM at two in the morning, lying on the couch, watching the little bats waft in the breeze, I know this in my heart: my life with this man is the best of all possible worlds. Sometimes maybe it’s the worst, too, but it’s the only one that’s truly all mine.
When we’re born, our brains and bodies are capable of just about anything. As we grow, our brains prune the neurons we don’t need, just as our bodies reinforce the muscles we use most often. Our abilities narrow, our worlds narrow, our lives narrow, until we are a person whose life is not full of infinite potential but, instead, is teeming with memories of things done and left undone. At forty, I am slowly coming to terms with the elementary notion that being in this world means giving up on other worlds.
When I was younger, I imagined I’d have several children, but it didn’t work out that way. I have one son and an adult stepson. I might be able to get pregnant now, but not without a lot of effort and a lot of explaining to do, as Neal had a vasectomy several years ago. So I’m reconciled: my genes and womb have done all they’re going to do. And even if I’d had a dozen children, one day they would grow up and leave me and Neal alone with each other.
One woman tells me that her father, married for forty-eight years, gave her a lesson in the role children should play in a marriage:
I was being a selfish teenager and it was hurting my mom and making my dad angry. He sat me down and said, “I need to remind you: you are not the reason we got married. You are a wonderful by-product. But you need to know that I loved your mom before you were even a thought. And after you’ve left this house, I will still love her.” I was shocked. It was like, “You are a blip on the screen of our relationship.”
On board the Titanic, Edith Corse Evans’s shipmate Ida Straus declined a lifeboat seat so that she and her husband could die together. The long-married sometimes die at the same time, either by desire or chance. A California couple married for sixty-seven years died at home, the wife within hours of her husband. In the memoir of her husband’s illness, Molly Haskell writes, “I felt that if Andrew died, I would die, too. Not by suicide, but just automatically, as bees die when they are detached from the hive.”
These stories are more romantic to me than Romeo and Juliet. When young lovers say life isn’t worth living without the other, what do they know? They haven’t lived life yet. When old couples say it, that means something.
Father Hartt tells me that, while of course there are plenty of happily unmarried people, some in his parish feel the lack of marriage:
There are a lot of really broken people. Unfortunately, especially for women, your sense of self and your viability is so under assault from this terrible culture focused on youth. Men have permission for eternal childhoods. So many people I know by all rights should have been married. They’re sad. They’re alone. They’re hurt. They’re angry at all the sexual passing along. Men as well as women. So let’s have another reason for marriage. Even people who are divorced have a certain dignity around the fact that that had happened. We need to look at marriage from the standpoint of aging, from the standpoint of cultural disposability, and look to an institution that says, “You are precious. Your union is precious. The community is supposed to think your union is precious. We’re going to do this in public so everybody knows and everybody is accountable.” That’s huge. It’s the opposite of saying you’re disposable or that there’s no hope or help for you if things go awry.
Over lunch, an eighty-four-year-old man tells me how glad he is that his marriage has lasted. He and his wife hit th
e skids a couple of times in the 1980s. On their twenty-second anniversary, they went to a guru in upstate New York.
“We’re having problems,” they said.
“You should do better,” said the guru.
The idea that they had a choice in the matter was a revelation. The guru was basically saying, “You have problems? Don’t.”
The man and his wife had major financial difficulties a few years later, but they weathered that, too, and now here they are, celebrating their fifty-eighth anniversary, living close to their four grown children and their grandchildren.
I tell him my friends are getting divorced because they’ve fallen out of love. He laughs. “Instead of ‘I’m not in love anymore, I need to leave,’ ” he says, “how about: ‘I don’t think I’m in love anymore and I need to know why.’ ”
Nearly everyone I’ve talked to who’s been married thirty, forty, fifty years has said something similar: that affection, love, lust—whether for your partner or for other people—these feelings come and go. That although the day-to-day struggles can feel impossible, the years zip by. Nearly all of them told me that they’d considered divorce at one point or another, and were glad they’d stayed.
One woman married for twenty-five years said, “Many times, it simply seemed easier to stay than to figure out how to divvy up the books. And then we broke on through to the other side . . . like playing a video game where you suddenly hit a new level that you didn’t even know was there.”
“When I wanted to leave, it didn’t seem like a good time for various reasons,” a woman married for fifteen years told me, “and then when it was a convenient time, I no longer wanted to. And so you sort of stagger on and then you think, ‘He makes me crazy sometimes, but what would it be like not to have him around? I wouldn’t like it.’ ”