by Kim Perel
Home Is Where the Husband Is
KRISTEN WEBER
I met the man who would become my husband as a college sophomore. Both of us were part of a group of friends that met weekly to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It felt like fate when we learned that we grew up four miles apart from each other on Long Island, although it took attending a college four hours away to finally meet. We bonded over shopping at the same local mall and the random fact that I was from a town without mailboxes. He asked me for a ride home for spring break, neither of us expecting what that simple request would turn into.
We graduated college still very much a couple, but also ready to find our own ways in the real world. I knew Marc wanted to be a television writer, but the jobs he could find in any way related to that field were few and far between. He lived on a friend’s couch and delivered scripts at night while I lived at my mom’s and commuted on a train into New York City. Our schedules were completely opposite. Our “dates” consisted of meeting at the parking lot at 5 a.m. for a quick hello among swarms of early morning commuters before I would start my day and he would end his.
I didn’t care about Marc’s crazy hours or his unsteady work. I blindly supported his dream not really knowing what it would eventually mean for me. In the meantime, I was living my own dream. A lifelong bookworm, I was working as an editorial assistant and slowly but surely working my way up the book-publishing career ladder. I moved into my own tiny studio apartment while he moved up to working in an office instead of out of his car. Neither of us could afford to splurge on fancy dinners or even to take cabs, but we managed to make our own cheap fun, and as long as we were together, we never felt like we were missing anything.
After living on our own for about four years, we found a one-bedroom apartment we could afford in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and finally moved in together. We also brought home a pug, which was probably not the best thing to do at the same time as we were learning to coexist as a couple in the same space. Sampson cried almost as much as I did his first few days with us. After a life of total freedom, we were overwhelmed by how much responsibility a dog turned out to be. But he soon weaseled his way into our hearts and became an essential part of our new life—and he really didn’t require much more cleaning up after than Marc did, although I never really knew whom to blame all the hair shedding on.
Marc checked coats and took on an assortment of odd jobs to contribute to our household income (in between the more relevant stints he could get in the very small New York City television industry). But even though we came home to each other (and Sampson) at night, in some ways it still felt like we were living a college lifestyle. Both of us were very busy with our own lives and responsibilities. We had separate groups of friends—many of whom were single—and we would hang out with them after work more often than with each other. We had a cozy apartment, a brand-new puppy with health issues that threatened to bankrupt us on almost a daily basis, and every single person we were close to in the world was a short car ride away.
Marc continued to look for work in New York, but the specter of living in Los Angeles always hung over our heads. Or, over his head really, as I was living in denial. We had met in New York and we were both from New York. Our families lived five minutes apart. I was thrilled that the man I chose was one who had roots as strong—and in the same place—as mine.
Reality started to set in when Marc had to go to Los Angeles for a few months during our first year of living together. The job he found was very loosely connected to the television industry but more than anything else he’d been able to find, and we were just happy for him to be receiving a paycheck doing what he loved. It had a clearly defined time line, but still—a long-distance relationship wasn’t anything I had signed up for. Our New York City apartment was less charming and more terrifying when I was living there alone. Having a dog that needed to be walked every three to five hours gave me the exact schedule cops warn single girls never to have. Our cute puppy also had serious stomach issues that would often result in us hitting the streets at 3 a.m., and that cute puppy wanted to say hi to every rat that crossed our path. When one afternoon a homeless man told me he’d been waiting a couple of hours for us to walk by on our usual walk, I knew that being a single mom to a dog with a boyfriend a six-hour flight away wasn’t what I wanted. I couldn’t wait for him to come home.
By the time I turned thirty—and after more than ten years together—my wife clock finally started ticking (blame that on being a child of divorce, if you will). I came home one night to Sampson greeting me at the door with a note on his collar, which led to finding Marc waiting on his knee with a beautiful ring. I couldn’t wait to start planning our wedding, complete with a pug ice sculpture and paw prints decorating our wedding cake. But then Marc’s dream came true in a way neither of us ever imagined. He finally got the call to be a television writer, and of course the job was in Los Angeles. I ended up planning most of our wedding with my mom, running whatever details I could by him when I could get him on the phone. A three-hour time difference doesn’t really work when one person needs to go to sleep before the other even gets out of work or one person is still sleeping when the other one is heavily into their workday. I never imagined I’d be tasting my potential wedding cake with just my mom and grandmother, or designing the menus with a coworker instead of my husband. We hit a low point when I had to send him our wedding-cake design to comment on via fax, although this is probably how I was able to sneak so many pug-themed items into our day.
We had an amazing wedding, but it felt more like a good-bye party, as I knew what was coming next. The minute we came back to New York from our honeymoon, he was on a plane moving to Los Angeles. There were no details on when this job would end, and this time his absence felt like a different ball game. I wanted to start our married life together, and he was embarking on the most exciting time in his career while coming home to a barely furnished, empty apartment. I had never been one to envision the 2.5 kids behind a white picket fence, but I also certainly never imagined starting my life as a wife with my husband not even in the same time zone. I finally knew what I had to do. Two months after our wedding, I quit my job, packed up our pug, and moved out to join him.
Moving to Los Angeles was a shock. I had some vague ideas about embarking on a new career or how this would be some kind of wonderful adventure. But I quickly realized that giving up New York, all my friends and family, and my incredible job was just too much. New York is a place that gets into your blood. I did try to make the best of it, though. We were moving away from the book-publishing capital of the world to a place where saying you’re an “editor” results in someone asking you to edit their film reel. I decided to become a freelance book editor anyway, so I could at least continue working in the field that I loved. Unfortunately, being a freelancer can be very isolating in a town where you don’t know a soul. Now I was home all day with only our pug to keep me company. And the pug wasn’t helping anyone make friends. He was too busy doing a dance of joy that looked more like a seizure whenever we hit grass. People would cross the street to avoid us so I couldn’t tell them it was a result of him walking mainly on concrete for years. I was also working in an empty apartment with only an air mattress and a couple of pieces of patio furniture as we waited for all our belongings in the world to make their way across the continent.
During the day, I talked to friends and family in New York and mourned the life I had left behind. There was a whole new life stretching out in front of me, but I didn’t want any part of it. I had followed my husband to Los Angeles for his dream, but I felt like all of mine were dying. I had the love of my life, but I just didn’t know if that was enough.
I often asked Marc why he hadn’t told me moving to Los Angeles was an inevitability when we first met, to which he replied, “There’s a reason all the stars live in Hollywood.” Hence, the denial. But even if he had made it clear (or even if
I had heard what he was saying), that wouldn’t have changed anything. I didn’t want to be in Los Angeles, but I most certainly didn’t want to be anywhere without him. And I realize now that even if he had put Los Angeles on the table as an option from the very first day that we met, I would never have given up him.
Marc and I call that initial period (even if it did last our entire first year of marriage) my black hole because that’s really what it felt like I’d slipped into. New York City is a hard place, but it was no match for Los Angeles. I hadn’t driven in ten years and was now living in a city where cars were the only option. I avoided the freeways, but trying to find a parking spot or where I had parked my car in a parking garage could drive me to tears. I tried to walk wherever I could—one of my favorite things about living in New York—but like the song says, “Nobody walks in L.A.” Crossing the street felt like an intense game of frogger, not to mention all the looks of pity I got from drivers (when they weren’t almost hitting me) for not having a car.
In New York City, you’re never alone even if you are alone. There are always people out in the street no matter what time of day or night, and I even started to look fondly back at my friendly Hell’s Kitchen homeless buddy who kept such a close eye on my dog-walking schedule. But in Los Angeles, everyone is in their own cars on their own schedules doing their own things. It was very hard to meet anyone. And I had a hard time putting myself out there. Trying to meet new people in Los Angeles often felt like I was back in high school, trying to break into the popular clique. I would come home and complain to Marc that I had all the friends I needed in New York and I never thought at this point in my life I would have to start completely over. He would buy me ice cream to cheer me up, and then I realized if I kept whining I’d weigh three hundred pounds.
In New York, I often felt like we were living very separate lives. We only spent quality time with each other a couple of nights a week, if we were lucky. It was much more common for one of us to come home just as the other was getting ready for sleep. I was never one of those women to lose myself in a guy, but we were all each other had in a brand-new city. We were completely on our own, away from everything and anything we had ever known.
Even though I felt sad and lonely, something amazing started to happen. Marc would come home from work, and we would go shopping for furniture. Slowly, our apartment started to feel like home. As we were each other’s only friend, once his job ended for the season, we were together all the time. I started to realize that just being with him felt like home. He made an unfamiliar and often scary place feel safe for both me and our pug. I had taken care of him a lot during our relationship while he tried to establish his career, but now he was taking care of me.
And then somehow, the sun came out—literally. There’s nothing quite like Los Angeles weather. Plus, we were having so much fun exploring our new city together. We acted like true tourists, keeping our eyes peeled for celebrities and even taking a couple of Celebrity House Tours. We loved going to the movies in Hollywood, where the person sitting next to us might actually have worked on—or appeared in—whatever we were seeing. We bought annual passes to Disney Land, and I loved that we could pop over there and ride the Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean whenever we wanted to. I loved being so close to the beach, and being able to hike through breathtaking canyons instead of just to the subway. I realized that being with your perfect other person can be all that you need, no matter where you are.
I had been with Marc for over thirteen years, but it took moving across the country during our first year of marriage to really become a couple.
Faith and Fairy Tales
ANDREA KING COLLIER
Once upon a time there was a young couple who was, well, picture-perfect, at least to the human eye. As happens in most stories that have a handsome prince and a cute, resourceful princess, they got married in an over-the-top fairy-tale wedding. There was a big dress, a bigger cake, big drama, and four hundred guests.
In hindsight, there was big dumbness. At twenty-six years old, I was so focused on the ring and the dress and the man of my dreams that I didn’t see what we know happens in almost all fairy tales. I wandered into marriage without a single thought about the wolf in the woods that would huff and puff and threaten to blow our house of new straw and no foundation down.
There was no planning for what happens when an only child (me) tries to build a life with someone with a big family (him). There was no planning for the arguments that would spring up out of the most ordinary things, like buying chicken already boned and skinned, or who gets to control the remote. Each, a minor struggle, but for two people who were totally unprepared for the delicate dance of negotiation and compromise that marriage requires, together they added up and got overblown. Not only was the marriage brand-new, but we had to figure out how to be grown-ups.
No. We couldn’t see ahead to the friends and family who would innocently or sometimes not so innocently wreak havoc in our lives. There were the arguments about his siblings or friends just dropping in without calling, or the chaos that ensued because I didn’t set up the spices in the same way his mother did. Each thing benign by itself, but together all the little things signaled that the honeymoon was definitely over.
The first year was a thousand-piece puzzle of sorts. Even though we thought we knew each other inside out before we got married, we had to piece together what it meant to be committed for the long haul. He struggled to understand a woman who couldn’t balance a checkbook to the penny, and I couldn’t understand why a man wore his old pants until you could see through the butt.
These are the things that didn’t get dealt with before we said, “I do.” They didn’t go away, they just boiled in the cauldron, like a witch’s brew. They just showed up each and every time someone left their socks in the floor or forgot to take the groceries out of the car—even decades later. The things we didn’t know needed to be cleared off the table in the beginning, before the wedding, like who’s family got us at Christmas and who got us at Thanksgiving, would become little bricks in the foundation of our marriage and our fights.
I was also challenged by a bout of depression, probably triggered by the loss of the grandmother who raised me. My husband would come in and ask what we were eating for dinner, and I would run into the bedroom in tears. He was confused by the sadness—after all, we got married, didn’t we? That’s what I wanted, wasn’t it? I didn’t know how to say that I had built an unrealistic fairy tale of a marriage in my mind, and we were not living up to it. In hindsight, I know that nobody could live up to that.
In real life, the first year is as perilous as any obstacle that the Brothers Grimm could imagine. And if you are lucky, you actually fundamentally like each other, because even that gets tested from time to time.
Almost everything that could happen in that first year did test us. He lost his job. I quit mine. We were broke as hell for the first few months, which is what happens when neither of you has a job. Someone robbed our house and stole our televisions, video recorder (it was thirty years ago), and our ice cream out of the freezer, in the very first week after the wedding. We moved—twice, including almost having to move in with one of our parents. It was like we banked up a whole lifetime of crappy stuff in twelve months.
It is easy in marriage, when life is throwing you all kinds of monkey wrenches, to forget that you love each other. Even the smallest thing, like going to the grocery store together, would spiral into a major fight. He didn’t know what to do any more than I did. Plus he was a guy. Sometimes he just wanted to be by himself to put on some headsets and listen to some jazz.
I couldn’t wrap my little princess brain around the need for alone time (something that marriage and little kids would correct) and saw it as a personal rejection of me. My mind went to all my insecurities. Wasn’t the whole point of marriage to be together ALL THE TIME? What was wrong with me? Why wasn�
��t I enough for him? Maybe he didn’t really love me if he wasn’t willing to go shopping with me or kiss me every time he left the room.
Or were we just two people in love, who might not be able make it work? In truth, I did love him so much that it scared me. All of my fears bubbled to the surface, forming a frothy toxic spill over everything that was important to us. Sometimes he could see it in my eyes, and say, “It’s going to be all right. I promise.” Sometimes I believed him.
Although we believe in God and good, neither of us is a religious person. Yet it was a real faith, a belief that we were really supposed to be together, that kept us hanging on. The first time I saw my husband I was out on a date with someone else, and I spotted him across the room. There was this voice inside me that said, That’s going to be your husband. Take a good look. Call it my God voice, or my too-many-glasses-of-wine voice, it was clear, and confusing. I’d thought the guy I was out with was going to be my husband. It would be another three years before I even saw him again, or even knew his name. But the first thing I remembered was that this voice told me who this man was going to be in my life.
Faith. Belief. Trust. I believed that God wanted him for me. I still do. You just don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if the gift came from something greater than you. If there hadn’t been that underlying faith, I am sure that I would have thrown in the towel at about six months. And that would have been tragic, because we wouldn’t have made it to see it get better, great, terrible, and then wonderful again. In order to have a real marriage, you have to stay married.