7. CW: Make sure you have a shared vision of the future.
A&J: Future = Way Too Scary. We’d rather stick to what we know: arguing about the past.
* Gong Tianxiu of Beichuan, China, not only sawed her own leg off, she also drank her own blood to remain hydrated after her husband died in their collapsed house in the earthquake of 2008. Driven by what she said was a “mother’s love” for her son, she was determined to stay alive so that her child would have at least one parent.
13
• • • •
Future Shock Spouse
“Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.”
—DANTE’S INFERNO
The average life span for most people in the Western world has increased by thirty years over the last century. People are getting married later, but “till death do us part” still seems like an awfully long run. We find that phrase daunting. Will we wake up one day and realize we’re just not that into us?
She Says
For more than a year, I had a gift box containing a small device sitting on my desk. It wasn’t until our son asked, “Mom, how come you don’t use your iPod Shuffle?” that I found out what it was. My Shuffle was so small, I thought it was a remote for an iPod, and because I didn’t own one, I just left it there. A child correcting your knowledge of technology is one of the first signs that you are indeed getting older. (That and the use of the word nowadays.)
With each day bringing a reminder of how quickly time is passing, I decided that after thirteen years of winging it, Jeff and I should talk about where we see ourselves headed. There isn’t a marriage book or counselor that doesn’t stress the importance of having a shared vision of the future. The Marriage Builders, a popular advice Web site, puts it this way: “You wouldn’t get in a car without directions to your destination, would you?” Clearly, they never drove to San Francisco with me. But this is a tough one for us. We don’t even share a blanket anymore. We gave that up by the fourth year of our marriage. Too much squabbling over the temperature. I’m always cold, Jeff is always hot, and one of us might have sneaked a bite of cheese and need to be sealed into a Dutch oven.
When I told Jeff we should create a marital mission statement, Jeff flatly refused, calling this a symptom of my neurotic worrying about the future. Guilty. I’m guessing that it’s not just me and that mainly women are pushing these kinds of discussions. We have to make plans because our physiology dictates time limits. Men also have a biological clock; it’s just that theirs tells them things like buying overpriced sports cars is a neat way to blow a lot of cash or that having sexual trysts with hookers in midlevel hotel rooms or attempts at erotic encounters in bathroom stalls might be a terrific way to fritter away a career in politics.*
He suggested this discussion is merely my obsessing about aging. Guilty as charged. If sports is the universal language of men, as Jeff suggests, I’d venture to say that at a certain age, cataloging the psychological and physical effects of getting older is the glue that binds most women. Nora Ephron famously hates her neck, while Chrissie Hynde says she doesn’t mind getting old, she just dislikes what she deems the humiliating process of getting uglier. Though Hynde’s assessment seems like an extremely disturbing sentiment, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had things injected in my face I wouldn’t clean my house with.
For all the new celebration of the cougar, no matter how smart and accomplished you are, you have to be taut and trim to get the same results as a guy. There’s only one Demi and Ashton. It’s a world of Michael Douglases trading up for the Catherine Zeta-Joneses. I would simply appreciate some advance notice should Jeff intend to exit our union, as it’ll take a lot of work to get the ass ready if I want to go back on the market.
When I finally got Jeff to sit down with me, he admitted he hadn’t ever thought that far ahead, because he was operating under the assumption that he would outlive me and take up with some very young, very attractive nymphet, whom he most certainly would not marry. That’s it? That’s his plan for our future? I was furious. Jeff has the audacity to think he’s going to outlive me!! That’s totally ridiculous!! As for his plan to seduce nubile young women, it’s not that I object to a last-gasp sexathon, it’s just that I’m a little dubious about his ability to attract sex-starved supermodels when his competition is going to be guys like billionaire businessman Ronald Perelman. I’m sure Ronny is a scintillating conversationalist, but one of his most attractive qualities is that he’s packing an enormously large portfolio, while Jeff doesn’t know the difference between a 401(k) and an ice-cream cone.
I naturally assumed, based on every available statistic, that I would outlive him, at which point, with Ezra safely launched into the world, I also have some plans. My list includes: traveling to Tuscany with my girlfriends who naturally will have outlived their spouses, walking across East Asia, digging wells in Africa, and election monitoring in South America or South Florida—the kind of do-gooder stuff I’m a sucker for.
Jeff tried to make his case for why he assumed he’d live longer than me. He threw out his low cholesterol number and that he goes to spinning classes twice a week. I retorted that I didn’t know my cholesterol level offhand, but the mere fact that he has that number at his fingertips is not something he should advertise to his future dates. No woman under fifty wants to know that you know your cholesterol level. Add to that the fact that his spinning class makes him so tired, he takes naps afterward, something that is definitely not a turn-on to anyone over six years old, and then only after they’ve eaten milk and cookies and had story time.
We stalked off to our separate home offices and began pulling up Web sites that claim to predict your date of death. Big surprise: every one of them favored my sipping champagne on the Italian Riviera and strolling through Burmese rice paddies over my husband’s fantasy fling with a coltish babe. I went to bed, happily tucked into my very warm comforter. It was maybe 1:00 a.m. when Jeff stormed into the bedroom, waking me from a life-extending good sleep, triumphantly waving a printed-out page from the sole death-clock site that had him outliving me. I had to explain that the result was suspect because he’d entered erroneous information to the effect that I have a negative attitude about my life. I’m not negative about my life; I’m negative about life in general. In fact, if there’s anything positive about my psychology, it’s my negativity. One of my favorite writers at the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande of the Harvard School of Public Health, has written about the importance of critical thinking, which, he argues, leads toward improving systems. “In the running of schools, businesses, in planning war, in caring for the sick and injured, negative thinking may be exactly what we need.” It isn’t a stretch to see that these same skills are exactly what are needed to run a family.* In fact, numerous credible sources see a direct correlation between a reliance on positive thinking, which lulls people into optimistic complacency and overconfidence, and lack of oversight, fueling everything from the housing downturn, the stock market debacle, and the Bernie Madoff scandal. If anything puts me in an early grave, I predict it will be the stress of dealing with the health-insurance industry, whose own mission statement appears to be: “Band together to make it as difficult as possible for people to receive the health care benefits they pay for.”
By 1:30 a.m., we’d come as close to a marital mission statement as we’ve ever come: “Our shared vision is to realize our dream of divergent futures.”
At 2:00 a.m., the contest to outlive each other officially began.
The very next day, Jeff was a man on a mission. For all of Jeff’s making fun of me, he’s the faddist. Not a day has gone by since our contest began that we don’t have blueberries in the fridge. Sure, sometimes we run out of eggs, butter, and coffee, but no matter what, we always have blueberries, whose antioxidant power Jeff believes will be the secret of his “win.” One week he’s gluten-free, the next he’s cut out carbs altogether, but if new research announces that carbs are good, he’s back shoveling brown rice into
his mouth as fast as Joey Chestnut pounds Nathan’s hot dogs. After learning that a restricted-calorie diet helps retard the aging process, he started eating less, mostly subsisting on hummus, flat breads, and vegetable tapenades. Upshot of that? Jeff does the majority of the food shopping and I hate hummus, so I’ve lost more weight than he has.
From June through August of 2008, the faint smell of carp followed Jeff everywhere he went. As it turns out, Jeff had accidentally sat on one of the trendy fish oil gels he downs daily. This had the effect of pressure-sealing the omega-3 gel into the fabric of his favorite jeans, causing his butt to smell like old salmon. He tried washing these jeans to rid them of the odor, but all that did was spread the fish stink to the other clothes he was washing. The stuff was literally oozing from his pores; you could even catch the scent of herring now and then just walking through our house. Eventually, he cut down on the dosage and his entire wardrobe had to be fumigated.
His effort to keep fit and healthy was undone further after he began taking Advil to ease some post-root canal pain. The Advil, in turn, gave him a stomach ulcer, and that eventually made him anemic. Result? Jeff got tired easily and started taking naps and Nexium to cure the ulcer. Poor old Jeff.
This whole contest is driving us both crazy, but we’re going to keep at it, because we’re determined to outlive each other, even if it kills us.
For all of our distant-future talk, the real conundrum is the future when we’re still ambulatory. According to my favorite death-flock calculations, Jeff is set to expire, hopefully painlessly and quickly, on April 9, 2036, while I’m not going anywhere until January 16, 2041. That gives us approximately 860,148,106 minutes together if we stay together that long—and the truth is the odds are against us. Many people, including futurist Alvin Toffler, have pointed to the fact that marriage as an institution doesn’t make sense anymore. In his seminal and startlingly still-relevant book, Future Shock, written back in 1978, he predicted that in the future it will be more appropriate for us to have numerous careers and multiple marriages that will reflect the enormous personal transformations one can have given our longer life spans.* I myself had a “starter marriage,” and according to Toffler’s paradigm, in a very short time from now, Jeff and I should be ready to trade each other in for new spouses with whom to head off into the new directions in our lives. But I hate the thought of not being with Jeff—how else could I tell him I found something new to be mad at him about?
So I’ve come up with a plan as to how we can manage to extend our marriage until one of us (sadly) wins the contest. As I see it, our one hope for the future is to keep working on our level of intimacy. Experts all say that the key to a long marriage is to increase intimacy. No thanks. Give me a little mystery. Intimacy is the gateway drug to familiarity, which, as we all know, leads to contempt.
Here is a list of things I’ve seen recommended for building intimacy: cleaning, shopping, folding laundry, building a snowman, dancing lessons, taxidermy, going to amusement parks, gardening, badminton, Bible study, coin collecting, and model building.
Here is the list of things we don’t do as a couple: cleaning, shopping, folding laundry, building a snowman, dancing lessons, taxidermy, going to amusement parks, gardening, badminton, Bible study, coin collecting, and model building.
Just living with someone can create a surfeit of closeness and transparency. If Jeff is any example, men prefer to operate on a need-to-know basis. For example, I happen to come from extremely hairless people; however, it’s true that a few hairs have appeared of late. They’re like those fanatical West Bank settlers: they’ve staked out a claim and are stubbornly making a stand on the formerly unpopulated plains of my face.
If the hair is black, you can have it lasered; but if it’s blond, you can use only a certain laser, unless it has a certain thickness to it, and if it meets those requirements, then you have to grow it out for a few days and then shave it. It’s so damn complicated and time-consuming that I’ve taken to stashing tweezers in our bedroom, the car, jacket pockets, and my wallet. It’s definitely tantamount to committing social suicide and it might even be a misdemeanor to have facial hair in certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Jeff demands confirmation from me on a biweekly basis as I sit in front of a mirror with a tweezer in my hand, “You don’t have hairs, do you?” “Of course not, sweetie!” I assure him. Then I firmly close the door and go back to inspecting.
Here are some other examples of how cultivating separateness has produced an unexpected wonderfulness:
We used to take long hikes together, but after one such jaunt, Jeff became convinced he had contracted a flesh-eating virus even after it turned out to be poison oak. That was the end of hiking for Jeff. At first I was really bummed about this, but I’ve taken up running and am in better shape because of it.
Jeff takes baseball vacations with Ezra and his sports wife, Coach Tom, and Tom’s future Hall-of-Famer son, Paris. I don’t think I could survive Jeff’s angry driving narration all the way to those spring training camps in Arizona, and they have a great time without me. On the other hand, I took Ezra with me on a job in Alaska. On one day trip, we were flown in by helicopter, dropped onto a glacier, and we learned to drive a dog sled. With his fear of flying, Jeff would never have accompanied us.*
As a result of our busy work schedules, Ezra’s baseball practice, and traffic in Los Angeles, Jeff and I rarely ever sit down to eat dinner together during the week. So when we do manage to grab a meal together, we have none of those so-how-was-your-day conversations followed by long, painful silences. We always have a lot to catch up on, we’re really excited to see each other, and we don’t argue for at least until dessert.
I never love Jeff more than when we’re apart. I get so lonely for him when I travel, I call to say, “I miss you so much. You’re the love of my life.” To which Jeff replies, “Who is this?” And when I get back, we’re very affectionate and loving and into each other for at least two to three hours.
Craving more intimacy is so much better than getting too much intimacy. We will have to be careful lest we find we’ve grown too distant and stop longing for each other at all. There is a difference between distance and distant. I don’t pretend it will be easy. As everyone will tell you, marriage is hard work. We’re both going to have to work very hard to earn enough money to afford the lack of intimacy to which we’ve become accustomed, but if we can keep it up, we’ll retain enough mystery that we’ll become our own future spouses.
Damn. That means we won’t be able to stick to our mission statement of realizing our divergent futures. Wouldn’t you know it? Another idea promoted by marriage experts doesn’t work for us.
He Says
When I was sixteen, the future was singing in my rock band in front of adoring fans at Madison Square Garden. At twenty-six, the future was starring in, writing, and directing my own films. At forty-six, the future is now aging, illness, more aging, serious illness, and then rapid mental and physical deterioration, still more aging, followed by death. So when Annabelle insists that I talk to her about our future, I usually tell her I try not to even think about it. I’m fine right here in the present, thank you. This approach, however, does not stop her from persisting in pressuring me to make plans for our future finances and questioning what we will do and who we will be as a married couple. “If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.” So says Philip Crosby, a man I never heard of until I was looking for good quotes that agree with me about the future. The only plan I make for the future is a grocery list.
Yes, it’s true that I did tell Annabelle that after she passed on I would like to meet and have one last wild ride with some young libidinous wild thing. It’s also true that we both calculated our demises on death-clock Web sites. Although she found some that favored her, I found one that had me checking out on June 13, 2053, and Annabelle biting it all the way back on February 10, 2041. This was very
much based on factoring in the issue of her pessimistic outlook versus my optimistic one. She denies this to no end, proclaiming that she’s no more a pessimist than I am. There are many things that I am: angry, impatient, easily frustrated, cynical, and stressed out, but compared to Annabelle, I’m Deepak Chopra. On Prozac. Drinking a martini. Getting a back massage from Natalie Portman.
There are several other factors in my favor when it comes to surviving my wife. Let’s be honest, is faddist really the right word to describe my diet of blueberries, hummus, flat bread, omega-3, and vitamin D, and avoiding red meat, pork, and dairy in favor of vegetables, seafood, and whole grains? Perhaps culinary enlightened might be better or pragmatically healthy or just plain dietarily brilliant! Now compare my Mediterranean/Asian/faddist nutritional regimen to Annabelle’s eating grocery store sushi and downing it with her fifth café latte of the day, while simultaneously driving and texting on her BlackBerry, and I think you’ll agree that it bodes a bit better for my future well-being. I also go to spinning twice a week and even though I’ve begged Annabelle to join me, she consistently refuses. I think she’s afraid she’ll have to be given emergency oxygen if she tries it and just doesn’t want to embarrass herself.
OK, I admit I got an ulcer from overdoing the Advil because of severe root canal pain, but after making fun of me about my old man’s teeth, Annabelle herself recently needed a double root canal. Beware the gods of irony! But most of all, I’m just a more positive person than she is and that’s probably because unlike Annabelle, I’m not so fucking anxious about the future all the time.
Getting older and dying is one thing, but being and staying married is another, and Annabelle is right to question what happens to a marriage as it ages. The phrase “survival of the fittest,” often attributed to Darwin and evolutionary science, actually means survival of the best at adaptation. Fittest makes one imagine that there is a species of frog out there pumping iron and doing wind sprints in an effort to survive the elements and predators. Darwin’s actual writing describes evolution as benefiting those species that best adapt over time. I believe this adaptability paradigm holds true for marriage. If there is anything I have learned after twelve years of matrimony it’s that I had better be able to adjust to whatever shifts occur in our marital ecosystem. When we first started going out, Annabelle loved how silly I was: “Oh, Jeff, who knew you were so clever and cute with all your different voices, characters, and sounds.” Giggle-giggle, laugh-laugh, pants off. A year later it was: “Stop meowing at me, Jeff. I’m a person, not a cat! And if you touch me one more time with that disgusting lobster oven mitt, I’ll never have sex with you again.” I had to modify my behavior at least a little if I ever wanted to procreate. (I still meow a lot, way more than most cats, but the lobster oven mitt has long gone.) When we were newlyweds, she worried about our becoming one of those Hollywood couples who care only about their careers, making tons of money, and renovating their kitchens every year. Now it’s, “Couldn’t we redecorate our kitchen just once before we die?” Because of her change of heart about finances, Annabelle has had to adapt to what has happened to my career trajectory. When we first married, I had a much steadier and more secure income, but as time has gone by, my career has become a lot less steady and my income far less secure. So there’s a very good probability that a large part of Annabelle’s evolving focus on our economic situation reflects my de-evolving income. And the odds are that in the foreseeable future there will be even more changes that will require both of us to adapt if our marriage is to survive.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 22