Lawfully Wedded Husband

by Joel Derfner

  None of the possible Ones upon whom my glance falls on any given day has any of these faults. The brunet standing in the 2 train reading Go Ask Alice has the same circadian rhythms as I do and would rush to any movie about a) sorcerers and/or dragons, b) aliens who try to destroy the earth, c) a college student whose roommate begins exhibiting strange behavior the day after fooling around with a Ouija board, and/or d) a guy who gets kidnapped by a top-secret counterintelligence agency and transformed into a powerful force for destruction but escapes to become a sword-wielding angel of vengeance and woe betide them who first disturbed his peaceful, ordinary life. The blond sitting across from me on the 5 train (I transferred at Franklin Avenue) playing a game on his iPad won’t sulk when I tell him I’m not interested in puttering around in the garden with him and doesn’t see the need to pressure decent, self-respecting people to eat broccoli. The stocky man in a shirt and tie walking three strides ahead of me down 14th Street toward Trader Joe’s doesn’t even subscribe to HGTV, much less spend all his time watching it, he prefers going to the hardware store alone, and he can choose a soap without even stopping the cart.

  Then of course there’s my Facebook friend Eric, who spells well, who isn’t losing his hair, and whose engorged penis, I can see from the picture he emailed me the day we were sending flirty messages back and forth, is not only larger than Mike’s and larger than mine but larger than Mike’s and mine put together and in fact larger than any engorged penis it has ever been my privilege to behold. And Matt, whose blog’s air of weary, threadbare irony is far more eloquent than anything Mike could write and who proved, when I met him in London, to be gorgeous, and if only I’d known that he and his partner weren’t monogamous I could have had one last glorious affair before starting to date Mike, and somehow Matt and I would both have realized that we were meant to be together and he would have dumped his partner and I would have moved to London or he would have moved here and my life would be perfect, and then of course that blond guy in Italy who caught my eye in the town square and beckoned me over but when I got to his table and his friend looked up at me expectantly I couldn’t come up with anything to say so I pretended I’d thought he was somebody else and went and sat in a corner of the cafe hoping against hope that he’d pass by on his way out but he didn’t and I lost my one chance at true happiness.

  (And don’t forget Cole, beautiful, perfect Cole, my new husband, but we’ve already discussed him.)

  Every one of these men would be a better husband than Mike; each would support me in ways that Mike could never even understand, would satisfy needs Mike isn’t even aware I have.

  There are just two problems with this.

  The first problem is that these men don’t exist.

  The second problem is that, even if they did, they would be terribly, terribly wrong for me.

  Take the brunet reading Go Ask Alice. I’ve already revealed that we share biorhythms and a taste in movies. Let’s be generous and say he prefers to be alone when gardening or going to the hardware store, takes a dim view of vegetables, has never watched HGTV, can make hygiene-product decisions faster than Mitt Romney changes political positions, spells well, and has a cock that would give Catherine the Great pause.

  The thing is, you can’t play connect the dots with only eleven data points. Or, rather, you can, but your chances of getting the right image are pretty slim. Take these dots, for example:

  I can look at them and see this:

  And I can fantasize and dream about it and know with absolute certainty that I’ve found the apple of my dreams, when in fact the dots actually connect to form this:

  You take my point: All I actually know about the brunet is that he’s handsome and has attractively ironic taste in literature. The rest of it I’m making up out of whole cloth—an unfortunate example of something that psychologists, if I understand correctly, call the halo effect, whereby humans assume, because we’ve evolved to draw broad inferences from whatever data we’re presented with, that attractive people are also smart, kind, fun, interesting, and good in bed. I want an apple, so when I see the dots Mr. Go Ask Alice presents, it’s easy for me to connect them to make an apple, when in fact I have no idea whether he’s an apple or a bottle of poison. Or, for that matter, a choo-choo train, a Finno-Ugric linguist, despair, the Principality of Andorra, Yggdrasil (the World Tree of Norse myth), Fyodor Dostoevsky, a bacon double cheeseburger, the molecular structure of hydrochloric acid, or dirt. In fact the chances that he’s an apple are so low as to be, for all practical intents and purposes, zero.

  Or are they?

  If there are seven billion people on earth, roughly half of whom are men, roughly 65 percent of whom are between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four (I am neither a pedophile nor a grandpa chaser, but those are the ages that bound the most appropriate category in the CIA World Factbook), roughly 5 percent of whom, according to the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law, might identify as gay—the old one-in-ten statistic, it turns out, was a little optimistic—then the chances that my soul mate is the brunet (who proves upon further examination to have a cute scar above his eyebrow; is he Harry Potter?) are something like 1 in 111,743,043.

  Not lottery-ticket-purchasing odds.

  But I doubt that even dropping the arch act and admitting that people who say “The One” don’t really mean “the one person on earth who is my soul mate” but “a person who’s perfect for me” or “a person who satisfies all my needs” or “a person who meets every requirement on my checklist” makes the odds a whole lot better. Because it’s really difficult for me to imagine that such a person can exist. I’ve dated guys who seemed to be The One whom I later had to dump because they turned out to be racists, or bad spellers, or bottoms like me (“What are you going to do,” my friend Stephen asked, “get together and bump pussies?”), or Republicans, or one or several of any number of other undesirable attributes that put them out of the running. Of course after dumping them I added their missing qualities to my list, but somehow the men I went out with seemed never to run out of new ways to disappoint me.

  It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong and that the stocky man in a shirt and tie walking three strides ahead of me down 14th Street toward Trader Joe’s would in fact have been the perfect man as I see him. I’m at something of a loss here, because when I talked about this in my last book I think I got it exactly right, and I don’t want to gild the lily, but at the same time it’s relevant to the discussion, so the best I can do is quote myself, à la Jonah Lehrer, and say that, if I had gone up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and managed to charm him with my self-conscious flirting, Mr. Stocky might well have turned out to be “gorgeous, hysterically funny, a towering genius, a master of sparkling repartee, fabulously wealthy, blond, multilingual (my dream was that he would speak eight languages but I [would be] willing to settle for five, as long as he could punctuate correctly in all of them), and possessed of beautifully shaped teeth. I wouldn’t even have to trick him into thinking that I was just as perfect as he was, because simply being with him would wipe out my faults as utterly as if they were the city of Carthage or Jennifer Grey’s old nose.”

  But statistically, it seems much more likely that he would have turned out to be a racist Republican bottom who couldn’t spell.

  “I’m willing to wait until I meet a man who’s exactly right,” said a friend of mine when we were talking about this a few years ago.

  “That’s fine,” I said, “but I think you’re going to die alone.”

  I don’t know. There’s no way for me to find out whether I’m right or not (not that I usually let that get in my way). So I could be spending this entire book justifying having made the wrong choice. I could be spending my entire life, for that matter, justifying having made the wrong choice. But I have to imagine that, once Cinderella and the Prince had been together for five or six years, he got pretty sick of her snoring, and she had come to hate the way he talked incessantly about the flora and faun
a of whatever enchanted forest they were passing through, and every once in a while she burped or he farted, and they continually disappointed each other and neither one of them was ever truly everything that the other wanted.

  And I guess the reason I believe this is that, when I think about The One and when I run down my checklist, sometimes making adjustments to it (no, I’ve actually realized that the requirement that he cry at the same time as me at the movies is more important than the requirement that he share my fantasy that one day they’re able to reconstruct the ancient Library of Alexandria and all its manuscripts), I feel like what I’m developing a picture of is not the perfect spouse but the perfect self, somebody who has all of my virtues and none of my flaws. Yesterday I tried to put on a pair of shorts I bought two years ago and I couldn’t fit into them, but if my husband, Mr. The One, has a perfect body, then who’ll notice? I end up in situations every day in which I have no idea what to do or say and end up stammering out something completely inappropriate that does nothing but embarrass me hideously, but if my husband is actually foreign royalty and has been trained to know what to do or say no matter what the circumstances, then I won’t have to face my own insufficiency. I only pretend to have read most of what I say I’ve read, but if I’m married to a man who’s read it all then it won’t matter, because I can just ask him and he’ll tell me and the end result will be the same.

  And I’m not a psychologist, but I can’t believe such a relationship would be healthy. Because if what you’re looking for isn’t a partner but a completion, well, you’re destined to fail, because nobody gets to be complete. Sorry. Game over. All your base are belong to us. I may see the world through thorn-colored glasses, but, in a society that allows Michael Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose flagitious response after Hurricane Katrina to a desperate plea for food, water, and medical services for the 30,000 people in the Louisiana Superdome was an email that read, “Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?,” to make six figures a year as a speaker about disaster preparedness, an equation that aims for wholeness requires a more complicated calculus than Disney can design.

  But if Mr. The One is not the spouse we all ought to have, then who is?

  “I just feel so much pressure from you all the time,” said Mike, as Dr. Basescu looked compassionately on. “It’s like, we talk about maybe doing something, and then you’re in my face saying, ‘Let’s do it NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW.’ With everything, not just the wedding planning. But the wedding planning is a good example. Like the ketubah. You’re so insistent about it, I wish you’d just leave me alone.”

  “The reason I feel like I have to be in your face saying NOW is that otherwise you’ll never make a decision. We say, we need to get a ketubah, and then I keep asking about it, and you say, oh, let’s figure it out later, and then when I ask about it later you say, oh, let’s figure it out later, and then it’s too late. So if we want a ketubah I feel like I have to keep annoying you about it or we’ll end up without one.”

  “It sounds to me,” said Dr. Basescu, “as if one of the issues you guys are facing is that you have different starting speeds. Joel, you go from zero to sixty in one second, and Mike, you take a while to get there. So when Joel tries to make you as a couple go faster, you feel like he’s dragging you more quickly than you feel comfortable with, and Joel, when Mike tries to make you as a couple go slower, you feel like he’s putting the brakes on and keeping you from going anywhere.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s incredibly insightful.”

  “Yeah,” said Mike, “it helps a lot to see it that way.” He turned to me, his face filled with relief. “So you just have to slow down and our wedding will be fine!”

  “Um, no, you have to speed up and our wedding will be fine. So what are we doing about a ketubah NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW?”

  “Can you guys understand how it might be difficult to hear what you’re asking each other?”

  This is what I learned in couples therapy: marriage is hard work.

  You paid somebody $125 a week to tell you that?, I can hear you thinking. Why not just stop by the self-help section of the nearest bookstore, close your eyes and spin around, and buy whatever collection of pabulum you end up pointing at?

  I understand. I’ve been hearing that marriage is hard work since before I imagined that marriage was a possibility for me. I get it. Marriage is hard work.

  But the people who say this are leaving out the most important part; they’re lying by omission. The idea that marriage is hard work never bothered me in the slightest, because I work hard. I work really hard. Really, really hard. I wrote and cut more songs from my last musical than actually ended up in the musical. I edit drafts of my writing as if they were crystal meth. Back when I was blogging regularly I could easily spend three hours on a two-paragraph post.

  No, the part that people leave out is that marriage is hard work of a kind that makes you incredibly uncomfortable to do.

  Marriage is hard work like understanding that, when you ask your husband on Saturday afternoon whether he wants to go to the theater with your friends on Thursday and he tells you he’ll think about it, and then he never says anything about it, and then when you ask him again on Tuesday morning he says can we talk about it tonight, and by the time you actually pin him down your friends have already bought their tickets and you have to spend Thursday night in front of the television watching season two of Dollhouse on Netflix, it’s not because he doesn’t want to go but can’t bring himself to say no, it’s not because he doesn’t like your friends, it’s not because he wants to make your life miserable though somehow he’s succeeding, it’s because having to make decisions overwhelms him and you need to find a different way to ask him.

  Hard work like realizing that it’s not enough to go on the neighborhood tour with him; you have to take an actual interest in the fact that the house at 127 was designed by the same architect as the house at 142 but ten years later and look how he evolved, even though you don’t care and can’t tell the difference, or he’ll feel like he’s doing it alone. And faking it doesn’t work.

  Hard work like watching his goddamn home and garden shows with him.

  And, conversely, marriage is also hard work like remembering, as you walk down the street, even though really all you can think about is which politicians you’d kill first if you got turned into a werewolf and could do so with impunity, or how the hell Julianna Margulies is going to get out of the imbroglio she’s gotten herself into on The Good Wife, that you promised a couple days ago you’d get your husband a new pair of nail clippers because he got upset when you used his, and keeping an eye out for a Duane Reade because, even though the pair he has is working just fine, and given the parts of him that have been in the parts of you the idea of not wanting to share nail clippers is ridiculous, and there’s no reason at all this can’t wait until you remember it later, if you come home without the damn nail clippers he’s going to feel like he doesn’t matter to you.

  Hard work like spending all day in your house without talking to a single person but having made excellent progress on a piece you’re working on and then realizing, when he comes home from a terrible day at work, that there’s only a certain amount of emotional energy he has left and it’s not enough for this, and stifling your excitement to tell him all about it.

  Like saying to him after dinner that you’ll be upstairs in five minutes and then catching sight of an amazing piece online about Johannes Kepler, father of optometry and author of the laws of planetary motion, and still making it upstairs within fifteen minutes instead of an hour, even though it means leaving unfinished the account of how Kepler was actually a sociopath who murdered his mentor, Tycho Brahe, and even though the piece about Kepler’s sociopathy opens up previously unimaginable vistas of thought and creation and hilarity, while going upstairs just means you have yet another conversation with your husband about what to do with the dogs when you leave for vacation. />
  And that’s the thing. I can bake pie upon pie upon pie for my husband, and I can write letter of recommendation after letter of recommendation for his students, and I can search for hours on end for the perfect dinnerware to replace the dinnerware I brought into the marriage, which he hates, because, despite the fact that those things all take hard work of one kind or another, I enjoy doing that work.

  When I’m trying to make lists of lycanthropic assassination targets or figure out how Julianna Margulies is going to rescue herself on The Good Wife, keeping an eye out for a Duane Reade only gets in my way.

  So I guess that’s what the “marriage is hard work” people are leaving out: marriage isn’t just hard work. Marriage is hard work that gets in your way.

  No wonder 50 percent of married people have affairs.

  There are a lot of different positions gay couples can take on monogamy: We’re monogamous. We can sleep with other people but only if we tell each other about it. We can sleep with other people but only if we don’t tell each other about it. We can sleep with other people but only if we take pictures. We can sleep with other people when we’re not in the same city. We can sleep with other people but not in our home. We can sleep with other people but only when we do it together. We can sleep with other people as long as we avoid certain sexual activities. We can sleep with other people but nobody more than once. We can sleep with other people but only infrequently. We can sleep with other people with no restrictions. (Of course there’s also the fact that either member of a couple can choose to abide or not to abide by the terms agreed upon.)