There are no easy answers about why some marriages last and some don’t. To Annabelle, eschewing intimacy seems to be key. That is so her. Deny herself something everyone else in the world wants, intimacy, in order to make herself long for it—I have to admit, there is a twisted logic to it. When she’s away working, Annabelle always calls to tell me how much she misses being at home with me. And when she’s home, she always shoos me away, saying, “Can’t you see I’m working?” Absence, however, doesn’t make my heart grow fonder; it only makes my heart start wondering about how I can become intimate with someone who is not so absent. I happen to like intimacy. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about the kind of intimacy where you’re all over each other, finishing each other’s sentences, and often riding a tandem bike in the park while dressed in matching outfits, all smiley and wavy at people ‘cause you’re so damn happy to be married. Yet, sometimes I get the feeling that if Annabelle had her druthers intimacywise, so that she could really miss and want to be with me, I’d have to live in a separate house, in a different part of town, in a whole other time in history. Say, downtown Los Angeles circa 1949.
On the other hand, knowing Annabelle, she could completely change her mind about intimacy, just as she did about my being silly or how she felt about making money and living a less bohemian and much more mainstream middle-class lifestyle. And if that day comes, I’d best be ready to adapt. She might want us to sell our house and move into a studio apartment. That way we would save money and have our now entirely intimacy-centered life revolving around and in our bed.
For both of us, the biggest riddle remains to be solved. Why do couples stick it out until the end? Is it out of habit, fear, and just plain physical and emotional exhaustion? I think of my grandparents. Pappa Pat on the couch watching TV, eating dinner by himself while Nana Katie cleaned up the kitchen. Although she couldn’t see him in the other room, she would yell at him to not eat so damn fast like a big fat slob and he would mutter under his breath between bites, “Why don’t you leave me the hell alone, goddamn it!” (And they were married for fifty years!) Or is it a real and profound bond that’s been made all the more rich and everlasting by the myriad of shared experiences over time, like the bonds forged by emperor penguins or Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas? Perhaps is it as simple as staying together for the sake of the children. That marital martyrdom tradition of pretending to the outside world that everything’s fine and dandy until the kids graduate from high school and go to college and you heave a great big sigh of divorce. What direction will our marriage take? Do we have a chance to make it together all the way into our senior years? As much as I’m loath to think about it, I feel that it still deserves some kind of answer, however speculative and ultimately unpredictable.
All over my office there are photos and drawings of Annabelle. Some of these pictures go back to when she was a little girl, and when I see them, I feel that even when she was a child, I loved her. Not a creepy illegal arrest-me love, but the nurturing love I have for a close friend’s child. The photos of Annabelle in her teenage years elicit a tender response as well, although I confess I’m starting to get a little turned on. Shots of her in her twenties during the 1980s in her Madonna/Cyndi Lauper/Boy George/downtown New York club scene phase make me laugh out loud, but I still think that if I’d met her then, I would have loved her no matter how stunningly ridiculous she looked. And by Annabelle’s late twenties and thirties, we had met and I was already smitten. I like to say that I have loved all ages of Annabelle and in keeping with that spirit, I can only hope that when I’m sixty, seventy, and eighty, when I’m all gray from top to bottom and my neck flaps in the slightest breeze, I will still love all ages of Annabelle, even in her sixties, seventies, and eighties. I have always asserted that I married Annabelle because I was in love with her. And although that love was somewhat pussycentric, it was and is not solely pussy based. If I really want to experience all of Annabelle, then I have to accept and love her when she’s all gray and wrinkly. If I leave her or she leaves me, then I will have missed out on truly loving her in all her ages and, worse, may have lost out on what just might be the best part of our marriage. Perhaps as we age together, our passion, agitation, frustration, even our competitive instincts toward each other, can be channeled into something more compassionate and wise. And if Annabelle and I stay married, there’s even the slight chance I can achieve my lifelong dream of doing something good. Yes, I do have other much more perverted lifelong dreams, some involving me with Kate Moss in a body stocking, Anne Hathaway in a one-man submarine with lots and lots of oxygen, and Charlotte Gainsbourg in a Parisian apartment with lots and lots of good Burgundy, but I’ve also wondered what it feels like to be a genuinely good person—to evolve from a self-centered, vain narcissist into a man, however old and decrepit, who is able to love someone regardless of looks, social status, or sex appeal. I don’t want to go all Hallmark moment here, but perhaps that is the point of marriage; it’s a test to see if you’re capable of not succumbing to your worst qualities and shortcomings so that in time you become the best possible version of yourself. Or perhaps you just stay together out of fear of being old and alone and end up at each other’s throats, dreading every second of your spouse’s company and waiting for his/her or your ultimate demise, which will finally put a humane end to your torturous relationship. What will it be for Annabelle and me? Only time will tell, but as I say, I’m an optimist.
In an increasingly disposable world where we’re constantly upgrading our cell phones, computers, TVs, and cars, marriage is increasingly the clearest reminder that we should not discard the people we love. Annabelle and I live in LA, and in Hollywood when a person becomes very successful, he or she often buys a new and better car, a new and better house, new and better friends, and sometimes even a new and better spouse. This “success” leaves many old friends, houses, cars, and even spouses in its wake. There is a reason why famous celebrities only hang out with, date, and marry other celebrities—because they can. But for Annabelle and me, and the majority of other nonfamous less-celebrated married couples in the world, we can live by a more grounded creed, which is to love someone by choice and without conditions. From everyone I met and could have chosen to marry, I wanted Annabelle. I wanted to be her husband from the second I saw her. As she and I get older, given all life’s uncertainties and instabilities, doesn’t she deserve to know that I will be there for her unconditionally? This seems like the only real thing I can promise her for the future: to continue to be her loving husband, “to have and to hold … for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part,” until that most tragic of days when Annabelle sadly yet peacefully passes on, and after mourning her in the most heartfelt and compelling manner, I meet and take up with a twenty-two-year-old Ukrainian model who for some reason picks me to fulfill her wild and perverted fantasy for very old Jewish men.
happily ever after?
Brain scans from a 2008 SUNY–Stony Brook study suggest that while for most people strong feelings of love fade after fifteen months of being married, and are gone completely after ten years, 10 percent of couples experience the same chemical reactions in the brain when viewing pictures of their beloved as when they were in the early throes of romance.
About 65 percent of adults said they cannot live without Internet access. When asked to rate what other things they couldn’t live without, the next highest response was cable television subscriptions (39 percent), dining out (20 percent), shopping for clothes (18 percent), and gym membership (10 percent). In addition, 46 percent of women and 30 percent of men said they’d give up sex before giving up Internet access, 50 percent of European men would rather watch an “important” soccer match than have sex, and a whopping 72 percent of Spanish men would rather tune in than turn on.
you can divorce, but you can’t get married
Trenton, New Jersey, February 6, 2009: State Superior Court Judge Mary Ja
cobson ruled that New Jersey, which doesn’t allow gays to marry, can grant a gay divorce. As of this printing, South Africa, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Spain, Israel, and France, along with the state of New York, recognize legal same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions but do not perform their own.
“The very foundations of our society are in danger of being burned, the flames of hedonism are licking at the very foundation of society.”
—Bob Barr, author of the Defense of Marriage Act (In 1992, while married to his third wife, he was photographed licking whipped cream from the cleavage of two women at a charity fund-raiser.)
* Add to that: having sex with your videographer or meeting up with your soul mate in South America on your constituents’ dime.
* One of the most surprising aspects of our marriage is how often I am called upon to give my “expert” medical advice. Annabelle, do you think my lymph glands seem swollen? I have a pain in my rib; do you think that’s serious? Does my kidney area seem cold? “Yes, no, yes.” “Really?” “I mean, no, no, yes.” (If he asks again, I switch the order.)
* Toffler and wife Heidi may have promoted the idea of serial marriage, but their marriage has spanned fifty years. “We have been arguing for fifty-six years, but we still love each other,” says Mr. Toffler.
* I informed Jeff about our adventure only when we returned home. In fact, I told Jeff that cell phones didn’t work on the ship we were on, just to get a break from technology. It wasn’t until a year later when he happened to call a friend traveling on the same cruise line that I was busted.
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• • • •
The State of Our Union
“Our nation is at war; our economy is in recession; and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH
(STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS, 2002)
The State of the Union is, of course, the progress report delivered by our presidents annually to the joint houses of Congress. It’s also a 1948 Frank Capra movie about politics in which Katharine Hepburn poses as Spencer Tracy’s wife in order to help him get into elected office. In real life, Hepburn and Tracy were romantically involved for twenty-seven years, a pairing that many people regard as one of the great romances of contemporary times, even though he was married to someone else, drunk for much of that time, and never acknowledged their love affair publicly. If they were alive today, their Facebook status would be “It’s complicated.”
She Says
I love my husband, I just don’t want to be his “friend.” I was on the opposite coast from my family at my friend Neena’s apartment when I learned that Jeff had just “friended” her on the social networking site Facebook. “Really, Jeff?” I said, “I had no idea he was even on Facebook.” I had never been on the site, so Neena signed on and showed me my husband’s profile picture. It was a picture of Jeff and Ezra walking down the street together. That’s so cute, I thought … my two guys. Then we clicked onto his photo album. There’s Jeff and Ezra at Yankee Stadium. And wait, there’s another shot of them, and though it’s hard to tell exactly where they are, it’s clearly a scene of domestic bliss. And then I glance over at Jeff’s information and learn that my spouse has declined to post his marital status. That’s when it occurs to me. Where am I? Is Jeff divorced? Could be. Where is the mother of his child? Who knows? Did this woman abandon the family? Maybe. Did she die a tragic death, but not so tragic that they haven’t recovered enough to go to Yankee Stadium? It’s very possible. It’s just a dad and his motherless-moon-faced-babe-magnet child floating out there all alone in cyberspace. I pick up the phone and call him, tell him I love him and miss him (after all, I am out of town), and then I gently suggest that if he doesn’t add a picture of me, I’m going to divorce him. To which he replies, “Is it going to be that easy?” Our e-mails get increasingly heated over the next two days. He gives me some crappy excuse about how he has forgotten how to upload new pictures since he made his profile and how if he changes his status now and says that’s he’s married, he’ll be deluged with congratulatory messages, and some people will even think we got divorced and he’s married someone else. We’re in a stalemate, but by the time my plane touches down in Los Angeles, Neena has e-mailed me the news: Jeff has added a picture of me to his Face-book page. I had to see that for myself, which meant that I had to join the site. I promptly “friended” my husband and he turned me down. After much cajoling, Jeff agrees to “friend” me and I get to see the picture. It’s of the three of us. I won. I was so excited with my victory that I wanted to learn more, so I scrolled down to the list of his friends. He has a lot of them: Caryn, Kimm, Jennifer, Holly, Leslie, Erin, Stacey, Stacie with an ie, Maddie, Madeline, Michelle, Marianne—80 percent of the friends of Jeff turn out to be female. Who are all these women? Some names I recognized as old girlfriends and acquaintances,* but others are a complete mystery to me. Then I casually peruse his status updates. Here are some of the highlights:
12/3: Jeff is lust in the wind.
12/10: Jeff is thinking about vaginas (plural????).
12/18: Jeff is porno in motion.
12/28: Jeff is horny for the New Year.
On some days he updates his status more times than he talks to me. I can’t help but notice that there are posts from all of his “friends.” Holly exclaims, “Oh, Jeff, you were always horny.” Kimm chimes in with, “Love you, you little dimwit!” Wait a minute, only I can call Jeff a dimwit. Nadine writes, “Thanks for the perverted card!” Huh? What’s going on here? I know that Holly was an old girlfriend who’s married, Kimm sounds familiar, but who the hell is Nadine? Nadine is gorgeous. Is this Facebook or is this J-Date? So I’m in my home office, which is located directly upstairs above Jeff’s home office, and though we’re less than a hundred feet apart, we’re not talking to each other; we’re fighting online. I angrily write to him: “Who the hell is Nadine and what kind of card did you send her!” He shoots off a note informing me that Nadine is an old friend from his MTV days, and as I’m writing “Listen, mister, I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m not happy about this,” messages start popping up on Jeff’s home page; the first one is from Nadine. She says, “I’m so sorry, have I upset your wife?” Then another one on mine, “Oh, this is fun—it’s like we’re all in therapy together,” and another, “Now, kiss and make up, you two,” and then my phone rings. It’s Spencer, a friend I haven’t spoken to in months. “What is going on? Are you guys OK?” he says with an urgency in his voice. That’s when I realize I’ve been writing on Jeff’s “wall,” which is being read by not only all of his friends but also all three hundred or so of mine. When someone feels compelled to break the cyberspace wall and reach out to you in real life, you know it’s serious. It’s also humiliating. It was like I had read Jeff’s diary, scanned his e-mails, listened to his cell phone messages—all things I’ve always maintained I would never, ever do. It’s the modern equivalent of rummaging through your partner’s pockets for receipts. In public.
Isn’t that what I have been advocating, that we give each other space, and let’s face it, room to flirt? Flirting might even have some indirect health benefits. Research conducted at the University of South Alabama in 2003 showed that people who don’t flirt very much have lower energy levels and rate themselves as less attractive than people who flirt a lot. Besides, the “work spouse” is now a commonly accepted phenomenon, and since Jeff works on his computer, in essence, his computer is his office. Facebook is Jeff’s work spouse. I want Jeff to feel attractive and have energy, so if he wants to flirt on Facebook, that’s fine. I just don’t want to know about it. On January 30, 2009, I “unfriended” my husband.
This whole episode was completely innocuous; it didn’t even rise to the level of a Little Children-esque discovery. Besides, I am the one with the short attention span and the bad record of fidelity, one of the reasons we are even together, and it’s not like I don’t have my own work spouses.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 23