by Kim Perel
• • • • • • • •
Having faith that you are where you are supposed to be, when all else fails, is a good thing. And it really came in handy in the first year when I took some money my mom gave me as a Christmas present and bought a few pairs of shoes (fifteen), and he got mad and bought a rusted-out old MG sports car with his hidden emergency savings account. My Prince Charming turned into a beast that sucked all the life out of me. And I in return became some screeching harpy who started every sentence with “You never,” or “I hate when,” or “I just hate you.”
During the time that we were both out of work, our routine was to get up in the morning and stake out our spots on the couch in the living room. We’d watch the Today show, and go through all the ABC soaps, and on to the evening news, with breaks for lunch or snacks. Thank goodness we both liked All My Children and General Hospital. I recently asked him about how he saw our first year, and he says those days on the couch were fun. “Don’t you really think that it was good?” He also remembers fondly the fact that I would cook three square meals, make pies, and grind my own hamburger meat. “Why don’t we grind hamburger anymore?” he asked.
After three months of soaps and soufflés and unemployment, we both got jobs, moved, and found a house to rent. We were the first of our crowd to have a real home. And I was the only person in our age group who actually liked to cook. So our house became a hub where our friends, even the married ones, could get a home-cooked meal without going to their mother’s. After a few months of relative bliss and traditional living, we decided to throw our first dinner party. It was a real grown-up party, with food that I cooked, good wine, and music. I used the china, crystal, and silverware we got for the wedding. And for that moment I think we were impressed with being married. I was happy until his brothers, who I had insisted not be invited, showed up. They snuck out of the garage with half of my food and all of our liquor. My husband shrugged and said, “You don’t understand because you are an only child. That’s what brothers do.” He explained that when you marry a person you marry their family, warts and all.
“Do you do that?” I asked, afraid that this was something else I didn’t know about him.
I just remember being so stressed out and overwhelmed that I passed out on the floor. The good news was that I didn’t have to explain to our guests what happened to the food and drinks. The party was over after that.
My husband was right. I didn’t understand nor did I have anybody who could help me figure it out. I soon learned that there is nobody you can really talk to about YOUR marriage, so it is best to keep your mouth shut. There should be a law. A newlywed should be banned from talking to other newlyweds—or for that matter anybody who hasn’t been married for a hundred years. Maybe they can talk, but they shouldn’t talk about their marriages. Given a frozen margarita, some good guacamole, and a little marital discontent, nothing but mayhem can ensue. Debriefing about the horrors of snoring and old girlfriends, and in-laws, without any context or life experience in navigating out of those troubled waters, isn’t helpful.
Sure it makes you feel as if you are not alone. But it also makes you wonder why anybody ever got married or stayed that way. Real conversations should be limited to women who are marital survivors. Would you expect answers about surviving job loss, breast cancer, a train wreck, or a hammertoe from a person who has no experience in surviving these things?
• • • • • • • •
Even if I talked to my mother about most things, talking to her about my fragile young marriage made it worse. She could be angry and passive-aggressive about her own marriage to my stepfather, and always gave me angry and passive-aggressive advice, even though she really did love my husband. The minute any marital pearls of wisdom came out of her mouth, even I knew I shouldn’t do it unless I was ready to wave the white flag and call it done. “Don’t be a fool for some man,” she’d say.
Women. Before the wedding, they are cheerleaders. Making you feel like an old maid for not being married yet. They point out all the fun you are missing. Yet not one of them tells you just how challenging the first year of marriage can be, until you are waist-deep in it. Of course, I wouldn’t have listened, because we all think that we invented a new kind of love, which is so musical and magical that it couldn’t possibly be anything other than happily ever after—every single day.
But I would have appreciated it if someone had just said that the first year is the thing you have to go through to get to the happily married part. Even if you have a first year that is one extended honeymoon period, it’s only the cocktail hour/warm-up and you’ve yet to sit down for the entrée/actual show. For me, the first year was like being rodeo riders. I had to muster just enough faith to hang on until the ride got smoother. Sometimes the frog turns into a prince, and on some days he goes back to being a frog. And sometimes Cinderella’s glass slipper gives her blisters, and she gets really cranky. Even though it was scary and awful and there were lots of red eyes and wolf breath and big teeth, this girl and the boy managed to go on to live their version of happily ever after—so far.
The notion of true romance and a love deluxe just gives you something to hang on to while you’re fighting or not fighting. Nobody tells you the whole fairy tale, so in the first year, there have to be lots of little leaps of faith.
At least I had faith that if we just hung in there, our marriage would survive. Many of our friends who had gotten married a year or so before me were falling down the rabbit hole. My husband and I had an unspoken agreement that no matter how angry we might be at each other, we never brought it out of our home. We had witnessed enough screaming matches among our friends to know that that was not how we would present ourselves to the rest of the world. All around us, there were divorces, near divorces, and things that should have caused divorces in that first year. Then there was one couple of friends who didn’t actually get divorced but lived together for about a year and never saw each other again. Not everybody got divorced, but everybody we knew was suffering the growing pains of learning how to be a married couple. It took me years to figure out that for most of us, it’s a part of getting to know each other and yourself in this new construct called WE.
The couple that swore that they were so happy, I found out later, was lying. They wove big elaborate stories about how blissful they were, and how they loved to see each other come into the room. And “what is the secret to your success?” those of us who believed them asked. Lots of sex, the wife would slyly answer. Now, this was a problem answer for those of us in the know. There was, in fact, lots of sex, but we later found out that 80 percent of it was being had by him, outside the marriage.
• • • • • • • •
I am still surprised at how little “long-marrieds” tell you about what it is going to be like in that first year. And it is even more fascinating that they all have the same doofus piece of advice: NEVER GO TO BED ANGRY. I am angry that people told me that. It is so, well, so not helpful. Of course you are going to go to bed angry. Maybe a better piece of advice is “try not to go to bed angry every night for two consecutive months.”
In the world of the fairy-tale marriage, telling someone to never go to bed mad is like telling Cinderella to get home before the coach turns into a pumpkin. Or it’s like telling Snow White, “Girl, you better not eat that apple.” You know it isn’t going to happen. If someone had only told me to forget that dumb advice, and instead told me how take a deep breath before I said the things that I would be horrified that I said decades later, that first year would have gone a lot smoother.
In the first few months, I tried. I just wouldn’t go to bed. I’d want to stay up and talk it out. If it took three days of spinning in circles and talking about long-gone girlfriends and the fact that he is inconsiderate in leaving the toilet seat up, then I thought we ought to talk it out. After all, real grown-ups with real marriages that lasted longer than fiftee
n minutes told us never to go to bed mad.
It wasn’t practical advice. It was aspirational advice. If I had been a better, more Belle version of myself, I would look at the Prince/Beast version of him and say, “What the hell.”
• • • • • • • •
Somewhere near the end of the twelfth month, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. And he got tired of hearing me scream and wail and cry. The fairy tale that never was gave way to faith that we should really be together. We sat down and talked about everything we had been through, and realized that even though that first year huffed and puffed, it didn’t blow our marriage down. We started to remember that before there was a fairy-tale wedding, there was a friendship. Even though it didn’t seem like it, we really liked each other and didn’t want this roller-coaster first year to ruin it. During the conversation, he got up and left the room, coming back with his only pair of shoes in his hands. “Do you think you could show me how to buy some shoes?” he said, with that sheepish grin that I loved. As if it was totally involuntary, a hootlike noise came out of my mouth. It was so startling and unrecognizable, it was laughter. Then he laughed. And this one little gesture clicked in a release—we laughed until we cried. With all the death and destruction, I had lost an essential tool for any relationship—a sense of humor. It felt good; no, glorious. And at that moment it became the unspoken agreement that we would find a reason to laugh, every single day.
The first year was impossible. The second was hard. The third one led to parenthood for the first time. The eighth year brought us a second child. There have been deaths of parents and siblings, lost jobs, and found careers. That first year was the first rung of the ladder, the bottom stair, the starter’s block. It was the once upon a time in a far faraway land of two really young people who didn’t have any magic wand or playbook. We didn’t know any spells. There was no wise old sage ushering us to the happy ending. It was a decision we made every day. There were some days that I’d say, “I love you,” in the morning, when all had I wanted to do was smother him in his sleep the night before. Then there were others that I would watch him sleep and be so filled with love for him, it would give me a lump in my throat. Never a dull moment.
In the end, it was more about faith than the fairy tale. It was about a belief in the voice that introduced me to my husband. I was the girl looking for the dream, learning that this one would require work and patience and love. Before him, I spent a lot of time singing “Someday My Prince Will Come.” And when he showed up, I had to learn how to love him, and to let myself be loved by him. Now every night I look at him and think about the ups and downs of our life, and every morning I think about our love and family, and am ever grateful for faith that got us through when the fairy tale wasn’t enough. Twenty-nine years later, I feel like we’ve got the happily ever after.
WE ARE SO GOOD TOGETHER
Ciao, Baggage
CATHY ALTER
They just kept going around and around on an endless loop, the same red knapsack, green duffel bag, and bungee-corded brown box circling the room like refugees stuck on a Ferris wheel. My husband Karl’s suitcase appeared immediately, loaded with Etro striped shirts, Ferragamo loafers, and his prized Dries Van Noten sport coat. But after two hours of waiting, frantically jumping from one baggage carousel to another as a smattering of arriving flights touched down, it became painfully clear that I would be spending the next ten days in Italy stuck with the clothes I had on my back: a BO-infused green T-shirt with a pink heart silk-screened across the front, a pair of jeans that were decorated with various in-flight meal mishaps, and highlighter-yellow slipper-sneakers. Not even my carry-on bag could save me—all it contained, besides my wallet and passport, was a handful of Dramamine, a horseshoe-shaped neck pillow, and a dog-eared copy of Thomas Mann’s appropriately titled Death in Venice.
It wasn’t like this the last time Karl and I were in Italy. Two years earlier, I had an entourage of luggage when we made our way from Rome to the Amalfi coast to attend the wedding of Karl’s good friends Eric and Shana. Back then, my multiple bags were jammed with everything from the filmy peignoir set I had planned to pull out on our first night in Rome to the full-length judge’s robe I had volunteered to transport to Positano, a favor to the officiant (who later admitted he wanted the extra space in his own suitcase for a postwedding shopping spree in Milan). Instead of asking myself, Do I really need all those shoes? I told myself as I demolished my apartment in a state of packing frenzy, You’ll be ready for anything—from a freak snowstorm to the sweltering heat that this new love held for me.
Of course, all this overzealous preparedness was probably a way of managing my anxiety, a belief that as long as I packed that pair of silk cargo pants, those fourteen tubes of lipstick, and, I’m embarrassed to admit now, a spare roll of toilet paper, I’d somehow manage to avoid another kind of travel emergency, one where my new boyfriend decided he didn’t really care for my company after spending five consecutive days with his plus-one wedding date. Karl and I had been seeing each other for only a few months, and up until our Italian getaway, we had spent only a handful of weekends together, lolling around in bed or on one of our respective couches watching reruns of Family Guy. This trip required putting on actual clothing and remaining upright for an extended period of time, negotiating territory beyond our regular haunts in D.C., and sharing a bathroom with a handheld showerhead and a door that did not lock or do much to block out certain, er, noises. It could be, as a friend so helpfully noted the night before my departure, “a make-it-or-break-it test of our relationship.”
As it turned out, weddings in countries with sun-dappled piazzas, hushed Byzantine passageways, and copious amounts of red wine are more of the “make it” variety. I spent most of the week crying tears of insane joy. Practically everything made my heart swell to Hallmark proportions: eating fresh fruit on the tiny balcony of our room in Rome, wandering around Pompeii and giving our own made-up tour (“Over here you’ll see some ancient toilets,” and “This was once considered Toga Alley”) when we strayed from the group, buying forty-ounce bottles of Peroni and drinking them on a scrubby patch of land while cars and scooters whizzed by and the sun set behind the Colosseum. “Oh crap,” I’d say every time the waterworks began. To which Karl would respond, “What have you done to me?” before cupping my face in his hands and looking at me like the romantic sap we both knew he was becoming.
I was deliriously happy because I knew what it was like to be so profoundly unhappy. Before Karl, I had been married to a guy who was so wrong for me, my parents actually phoned a week before the wedding and told me it wasn’t too late to call things off. (“I could have had my eyes done!” my mother later complained, annoyed that she had forgone an eye lift in order to pay for what she called my “starter marriage.”) I spent the entire five years of marriage trying to prove everyone wrong, impressed by my fortitude even as I turned inward and old, an angry stranger to myself and a sad nuisance to friends.
But in Karl I had found someone who finally made sense. Handsome and forthright and predictable in a way that was a lifesaver after my gay-divorcée haze of bad decisions, Karl adored me for the precise reasons for which I wanted to be adored. He listened intently to early drafts of stories and laughed uproariously in all the right places. When I brought home a teaching award for distinguished professional achievement, he told me I was the prettiest genius he knew. And when my head became hot with sleepiness, he would lay his palm across its crown and say, “Sometimes I see you as a little girl.”
Is it any wonder that Italy—a boot that seemed custom-made just for us—became the embodiment of every four-hankie chick flick I had ever seen?
I bawled the hardest on our last night. Karl and I had begged out of the postwedding group trip to Capri and rushed back to Rome, our Rome, where we strolled the fancy streets near the Spanish Steps and ate dinner al fresco with the Parthenon as our background
. “I don’t want to leave,” I sobbed on the steps of a church, flat on my back and staring up at the stars. Returning to Washington meant reentering our real lives, held in separate beds, compromised by the demands of work and abandoned friends, a burning relationship essentially watered down on American soil. In my ideal world, Karl and I would remain joined at the hip.
“We’ll come back,” Karl said, gently cradling my head against the cool church steps. “You’ll see.”
• • • • • • • •
And we did come back, deciding to celebrate our first year of marriage in the country where we fell in love. It didn’t escape me that the last time we were in Italy had been to witness the marriage of our friends and now we were back to celebrate our own, and I fully appreciated the trip’s symmetry.
Of course, I wanted to pack accordingly. We would be kicking things off with four days in Florence, new territory for us, and wrapping things up in Rome, a welcome-back tour of our burgeoning romance. And even though I was no longer packing to manage my nutty relationship jitters—the ring on my finger pretty much took care of that—I realized that successfully subjugating that anxiety had freed up way more space in my suitcase for extra shoes, among other (plenty of other!) things.
So when we arrived in Florence and my luggage did not, I was concerned it would be hard to repeat the same romantic glow of our past trip dressed in dirty jeans and a sweat-stained T-shirt. This was not the chic image I had of myself parading up and down the Via Veneto.
“Don’t worry,” Karl said as we joined the line of other passengers in similar luggageless states. “I’m sure your suitcase will show up tomorrow.”
Not to insult the way things work in Italy (Berlusconi has pretty much roped that cow), but after a lot of hand gestures and mounds of paperwork (helpfully prepared in Italian, a language I can only order in), I had little confidence that my luggage would arrive in time for our golden anniversary.