by Ada Calhoun
Another woman, who’s been married to her wife for as long as we’ve had marriage equality, referred me to a poem called “The Longly-Weds Know,” which begins:
That it isn’t about the Golden Anniversary at all,
But about all the unremarkable years
that Hallmark doesn’t even make a card for.
It’s about the 2nd anniversary when they were surprised
to find they cared for each other more than last year
And the 4th when both kids had chickenpox
and she threw her shoe at him for no real reason
The other night, Neal returned home from watching a basketball game with a friend, and he looked shell-shocked. The bar owner had come over to talk with Neal and our friend and ended up telling them the story of his divorce.
“He said he had an affair and when his wife found out, she threw him out and won’t let him see the kids,” Neal told me. “He’s spent all his money on lawyers. His credit cards are maxed out. Worst of all, his kids are babies, and he’s missing months of their lives. He says it’s all because he had a fling with ‘some blond woman.’ He kept saying that phrase, ‘all because of some blond woman.’ He looked like he’d been hit by a truck. Let’s never get divorced.”
Bored at work, I used to Google ex-boyfriends. I thought of this as like the David Carr book The Night of the Gun, except that where Carr went back and reported on his years of addiction, I tried to figure out where my junior high boyfriend was now. Neal nicknamed me “Decades-Later Detective.”
One day, I turned up a video of the writer Brad Will, who I’d hung out with when I was eighteen. During our ensuing years as pen pals, he’d stolen a disability poster from a Colorado library—a big picture of a smiling Bill Clinton with the words “America Needs You to Keep the Promise of ADA.”
Sitting at my desk in a Manhattan newsroom, I watched the video on YouTube. It showed him in Mexico, covering Oaxaca as a reporter for a site called Indymedia. The camera recorded him being shot, and then bleeding, and then dead—lying on the pavement in his underwear. The finality of death hit me hard. How obvious: death is forever, and yet how shocking it seemed in that moment. All the tempters in my life, beckoning me out of marriage—they’ll die, too. I don’t look up exes so much these days.
Last night I had a dream that either Neal or I was dying; it wasn’t quite clear in the dream haze which one. “I’m here,” I was saying when I woke up.
I found myself grateful that Neal wasn’t dead and I wasn’t, either. When I imagine him dead, I feel myself missing him—missing even, maybe especially, the things about him that irk me, down to the clacking of his teeth on his spoon while eating cereal. I think maybe what they say is true: that you can’t be loved if you’re perfect; only the flawed, the King Nalas, are lovable.
I’m glad you’re not dead, I thought, looking at Neal still sleeping.
Then, like most mornings, I got out of bed, turned off the night-light, and switched on the aquarium light for Oliver’s pet turtle, Ginny, and her five fish roommates. The fish are nineteen-cent feeder goldfish who the turtle befriended instead of eating, making her dinner our new pets. I packed Oliver’s snack, woke him up, and started making breakfast—doing the work of keeping our family going, hoping that these little actions will help us have a good day, a good week, a good life.
What does it mean to say you’re present? It’s defiance: Elaine Stritch singing, “I’m Still Here.” It’s what you say when you arrive after being somewhere else. It’s reassuring. It means you’ve come back, or that you haven’t left. And maybe eventually it means “I’m here now, so you can let go.”
Thomas Jefferson sat by his wife’s bedside as she lay dying. They had been through so much, losing child after child. And now, at just thirty-three, she was dying, too. They had been reading a book together, Tristram Shandy, and she had begun to write out a paragraph. He picked up the copying in his own, stronger handwriting: “I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!” He kept that piece of paper close for the rest of his life.
In my dream, either I was saying I wasn’t dead yet or that I was staying by Neal’s side as he lay dying. If we stay together, we could be that for each other. I imagine me saying, “I’m here” to him or him saying it to me. And on that day it will mean: You’re not going to die alone. Look at that. You stayed and I stayed, and here we are at the end. The other people we had crushes on—where are they now? The fights—who can remember what they were about? The money problems—do they matter? The school concerts, the bills, the nights one of us slept on the couch, the jokes, the trips, the irritable mornings, the parties, the weeks of no sex or lots of sex—they swirl into a life together. That was the race, and this is the ribbon. That was the trail, and this is the crest. Those were the bricks and mortar, and this is the house we built.
Stirring pancake batter, I look around our little apartment. I have to make sure Oliver is getting dressed. I have to remember to pick up groceries on the way home. I have to make a million calls. None of it, right this second, matters.
“Where’d you go?” Neal mumbles from the bedroom, still half-asleep.
“Nowhere,” I say. “Nowhere at all.”
EPILOGUE
One Toast I Would Actually Give
There is sure to be another flood toward, and these couples are coming to the ark. Here comes a pair of very strange beasts, which in all tongues are called fools.
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1599
EXACTLY A YEAR AFTER the Minneapolis trip with the missed flights, Neal and I went to a friend’s wedding in the Dominican Republic. (“Destination wedding on second marriage—bold move,” another friend said.)
This friend had been married to someone else when we’d met him. Then we’d been friends through his divorce—I’d helped him assemble Ikea furniture and paint his bachelor pad. And I’d observed with prurient glee his Tinder-tastic dating life, and then celebrated when he met his cool new girlfriend, now fiancée.
Over the past nine years, his daughter and our son, just a few months apart in age, have enjoyed countless playdates. We’ve watched them go from putting acorns in their mouths, to learning how to ride scooters, to racing through apartments and parks and eating buttered pasta and cut-up cucumbers while we drank coffee or beer, to watching Spy Kids 2 for the tenth time, to building Lego fortresses and asking us to please leave them alone.
In the run-up to the wedding, Neal and I were getting along better than we had in years. We were closer, and laughing more and feeling more committed. Oliver had a lot of friends; parenting now largely involved making stovetop popcorn and handing it to the kids while they traded Pokémon cards. We’d reached a new, happier normal.
And yet.
A week before our trip, Neal realized he’d misplaced his passport, prompting a weeklong search through various closets and basements within a 150-mile radius, during which I began a stressful new job. I’d had to delay my flight a few days because of this opportunity—a gig from which I was terrified of being fired because I’d already mentally used the money to pay off our debts. Oliver became sick upon touching down on foreign soil and spent two days throwing up and going in and out of a fever. With every text message, I panicked and second-guessed all of Neal’s decisions and sent him directions to Dominican urgent-care clinics.
And yet again.
By Saturday, our friend’s wedding day, the three of us, all with our passports and our normal body temperatures, were sitting on gold chairs on a patio at the edge of a cliff, looking out over the Caribbean Sea while Yaz’s “Only You” played from the speakers and our friend stood under an interfaith canopy and his girlfriend walked toward him, her parents flanking her on either side, and I teared up and reached over Oliver’s head to put my hand on Neal’s shoulder.
“What should we say in our vows?” this friend had asked me a few weeks earlier, over a dine
r lunch, while our kids borrowed our phones to craft stories in emoji language and dared each other to eat stupid numbers of crackers.
I tried to come up with something he could use.
Marriage isn’t a happiness factory.
He knows that. He was married before.
Staying married is a decision, an active choice at once creative and brave. It can be rewarding, distressing, mystifying, enlivening, or all those things at once.
Would that suggest that he should have stayed in his first marriage? I didn’t mean that.
“Saying you’re going to stay together is plenty,” I told him finally. “You don’t have to gild the lily. ‘I do’ covers it.”
The friend they had perform the ceremony did a lovely job. They opened up the mike for toasts, and there followed the usual cheery hodgepodge of sentiment. While I hadn’t planned on giving a toast, I did think of something I might say. But by the time I felt the impulse, that part of the night was ending and Neal was being called on to do a song-as-toast.
“I wrote this on the way here,” he joked, waiting for the backing music to come on, and then he did a devastating cover of “I Would Die 4 U” by Prince, who had died days before. Everyone sang along with the chorus and hugged each other and cried.
“Your friend is so talented,” the groom’s father told his son. “How amazing that he wrote that song just for you.”
With that, it was indisputable: Neal had officially won the wedding. He had been the good dad restoring a sick child to health and the king of rehearsal-dinner karaoke (every phone in the place, including the bartenders’, came out when he took on Sisqó’s “Thong Song”). He’d played Shark and Minnows with the kids and drunk beer with the guys, endearing himself to partygoers of all ages.
“Oh, how nice,” he would say the morning after the wedding, showing me a list of Facebook friend requests from roughly everyone on the guest list. (I quickly checked my account to discover three invites; two were spam.)
I was reminded of an actress friend who says that seeing her husband in plays rekindles her attraction to him. When other people look at him, she is able to “reobjectify” this man who day-to-day is so familiar. Watching Neal at this wedding, I was reminded of how fortunate I am.
And so this is what I would have said in my toast:
I am so happy for you. But I’m just as happy for all of us here today. By getting married, you are doing something religious in the oldest sense of the word: bringing us together in a common spiritual purpose, making a community where there wasn’t one before.
Making a relationship official and public changes it. When you have witnesses from both families, each person’s tribe is on its own side, and when the couple walks back up the aisle after getting married, they’re like the pull tab on a zipper, merging the two sides into one family for the rest of human history.
Today you showed, may the atheists in the room forgive me, faith—faith in each other, in all of us assembled here, and in yourself; faith that together we will be able to do something enormous: help you stay together, loving each other, until you die.
I have only two pieces of advice about marriage.
The first is that my mother is right. The way you stay married is simple: you don’t get divorced. All the couples therapy and communication seminars in the world won’t save you if you aren’t prepared to close your eyes and hug the mainmast through a storm. One of the best skills you can cultivate in a marriage is, ironically, stubbornness.
Perhaps it helps to know that the demise of marriage as an institution has been overstated for centuries. “The estate of marriage has universally fallen into such awful disrepute,” Martin Luther wrote in 1522. In 1914, another revolutionary agitator, Emma Goldman, noted, “That marriage is a failure none but the very stupid would deny.” As proof she quoted the astronomical rate of 73 divorces for a population of 100,000.
The second is that a marriage is made up not of years of faithful service but of moments of grace. Good manners help, but the couples who endure are not always the ones who are the most compatible or the best behaved, the ones who take out the trash without being asked and never look at another person with lust and who balance their checkbook and agree on whether or not to sleep-train their kids and who “chose well.”
No, the marriages that thrive are the ones between people who appreciate grace. Such grace appears in those moments when you suddenly see the person you’ve always known just as you’ve always known them but also as someone surprising, someone brand-new. Catholic weddings often include a reading from Genesis. Upon seeing Eve, Adam says, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” If weddings required a catchphrase, I think that could be it: “At last.”
At a wedding, the bride and groom transform into archetypes. The here and now becomes what experts in ritual describe as “a moment of eternity and eternal return.” We are connected backward to those who have been joined together before us, going all the way back to prehistory, and forward, to those who will continue to find each other after we are dead.
When we marry, we are saying that our union—however messy or fraught or complicated it might also be—is holy, too. We invite those we love to consecrate it with their toasts.
“The Jewish way of appreciating life at its finest is the language of blessing,” says Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, calling that word akin to “grace.” “ ‘What a blessing I found you,’ you might say to your partner. ‘What a blessing to sit here and hold hands, or to enjoy the sunset and look at you and know we are together.’ ”
Such a moment of grace is what we experience when we watch a bride walking down the aisle. Here she is, our old friend, or daughter, or cousin, or aunt. She is the person we know, but suddenly she’s different, too. This person approaches the altar as if from out of the clouds, as though she’s come from another world with a message for us.
And she has.
That message is: Remember this—how surprising and miraculous and startling grace feels. Especially remember it when your wife tells you you’ve done everything wrong or your husband loses his passport or when your attractive colleague sits next to you at a work conference or for whatever other reason you feel the urge to get on a plane and fly as far away as possible. You need something in those moments to hold on to, so you can remember why it might be better to stay. Today we’ve all been handed such a moment.
May you have a million more in the years to come: when you see your husband or wife through a crowd and think, “Who is that?” and realize it’s the person you picked and who picked you five, twenty, fifty years before.
You can’t plan for grace. These moments are like shooting stars: you see them only if you’re watching, and you see them more clearly when it’s dark.
Most of those moments will be private. No one but you will see them. Today is one that we all got to see. Thank you for that. Now when you have trouble, we can remind you of today, a day in which we saw you promise to stay, and we promised to help.
Weddings remind us why we were put on earth—to witness these moments, to let them bind us together. May we always remember this: nothing more nor less than these moments of grace will keep you—will keep us—together, all the days of our lives.
Cheers.
APPENDIX
Toward a More Realistic Reception Playlist
THE USUAL WEDDING PARTY playlist reinforces the idea of marriage as something that happens under a rom-com’s closing credits. Here are a few more relevant options:
“All the Right Reasons”—
The Jayhawks
“La Chanson des Vieux
Amants”—Jacques Brel
Devotion and Doubt (whole
album)—Richard Buckner
“Farther Along” (gospel
hymn)—Dolly Parton,
Linda Ronstadt, and
Emmylou Harris
“I Really Don’t Want to
Know”—Elvis Presley
“In My Life”—T
he Beatles
“In Spite of Ourselves”—
John Prine and Iris DeMent
Lemonade (whole album)—
Beyoncé
“Livin’ on a Prayer”—Bon Jovi
“On the Other Hand”—
Randy Travis
“Right Down the Line”—
Gerry Rafferty
“Strangers”—The Kinks
“There Will Be No Divorce”—
The Mountain Goats
“Thin Line Between Love and
Hate”—The Persuaders
“2 Way Street”—Slick Rick
“We’re Gonna Hold On”—
Tammy Wynette and George Jones
“Wishing Well”—Jo Dee
Messina
Acknowledgments
In 2015, in a fit of pique, I wrote an essay about fighting with my husband. That piece, “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give,” was named No. 41 on the list of most-read stories in the New York Times that year (but who’s counting). Thanks to Dan Jones, for expertly editing it for the Modern Love column, and to my terrific agent, Daniel Greenberg, for seeing it as a book (and to his colleagues Jim Levine and Tim Wojcik for their support).
Thank you, friends and strangers I interviewed, for being so frank with me. Particular gratitude goes to my oldest friend, the gifted therapist Asia Wong, and to the brilliant reporter Jason Zinoman, for their wise comments on early drafts.
Thanks to everyone who abetted my research, particularly Paul Hartt, Don Waring, Lawrence A. Hoffman, Nura Manzavi, Christian Rada, Evyatar Marienberg, Victor Hori, Martha Ertman, Naomi R. Cahn, and Kelly Roberts.