A Cup of Comfort for Couples

by Colleen Sell

  “Baby!” I called across our little apartment. I was at the computer in our office; he had stepped into our bedroom. “We’re signing you up on Facebook.”

  “No,” he said, as always, but walked into the room. A few minutes later, he was in the chair, looking up friends, and smiling too.

  By the next day, he was back in touch with Harold and Jeff, whom he hadn’t talked with in fifteen to twenty years, and he was posting back and forth with our family in California and reaching out to our kids and friends in Portland and even friends here in Bend. From then on, I often came home from work to find him on the computer, sometimes laughing out loud. I felt pleased with myself . . . until one night when I walked into the house and saw John standing in the kitchen with a nervous look on his face.

  “Honey, I have to tell you something,” he said. “I went onto Facebook . . .” And my loving husband proceeded to rattle off his story about how he was looking at a friend’s “friends” page and came across a girl named Pauline who had been a friend of his in high school. He wrote her a little note saying, “Hi, it’s fun to see your face. You don’t have to write me back, just wanted to say hello,” something like that; sent it off; decided to look at her “friends” page and saw . . . and here he paused.

  “Cindy!” I threw in.

  “Yes,” he said. “And I didn’t feel like I could ignore her without hurting her feelings. So I wrote her the same sort of note, with the ‘you don’t have to friend me back.’ And well, Pauline didn’t, but Cindy did.”

  I kind of laughed, thinking John was pretty cute.

  “Let’s go look at her!” I said, excited to see what this Cindy looked like.

  John and I giggled our way into the office. He pulled up his Facebook account and sat me in the chair. Cindy’s picture was off to the left, among John’s cluster of friends. I clicked on it and then clicked on it again to make it bigger.

  “Shit! She’s hot. And skinny,” I said. But I continued to giggle, now because I was a little nervous. “Honey, how fun,” I said, trying to be a big girl.

  I am fifty-three. John is fifty-five (which means I only have five years to get over this jealousy thing).

  John pulled out a blue sticky-note, wrote his Facebook log-in and password on it, and shoved it at me. “You can go on anytime,” he insisted.

  “Oh, honey, I’m not — ” I crushed it in my palm and tossed it into the trashcan without even finishing my sentence.

  My cell phone rang. It was our twenty-nine-year-old daughter.

  “Hey, go onto Facebook,” I told her. “You can see Daddy’s old girlfriend. She’s hot. And she’s skinny.”

  As you’ve probably figured out, I am not skinny, for sure. I weigh forty pounds more than when John and I got married. But he thinks I’m hot and tells me often.

  Over the next few days, I continued to tell close friends and family to take a peek at Cindy on John’s Facebook page. And then I let it go, truly . . . until I walked into the apartment after a very rough day at work and John quickly turned off the computer. Cindy! is where my mind went. Embarrassed, I kept my mouth shut.

  John stood, greeted me with a hug, and then while pouring me a glass of chardonnay said he had chicken and broccoli ready for me. John has been doing most of the cooking since he’s been out of work. Sometimes it’s breakfast while I’m getting ready for work; sometimes a sack lunch; and often dinner, which he keeps warm if I work late. This was a late night, so he had already eaten. He sat and visited with me while I ate my warmed dinner at the kitchen table, patient with me as I shared my day.

  I decided to finish my wine while checking my e-mail. John went into the living room to catch up on what was happening with the NCAA’s “March Madness” on TV. E-mail-schmemail; I went straight to Facebook, to John’s wall, and stared at Cindy. I turned off the computer, fast. Went in and sat right next to my husband on our big ol’ couch.

  “We’ve got a problem,” I said.

  John paused his recorded basketball game.

  “Honey, I’m jealous of Cindy. It wouldn’t be so hard if she wasn’t so pretty,” I said . . . okay, whined.

  “I’ll just block her,” he said.

  “No, you can’t do that.”

  “I knew this could be a problem. I’ll close my Facebook account.”

  “No. You’re having so much fun with it,” I said. “I’m sorry. But you being friends with Cindy feels dangerous to me.”

  John stiffened, feeling like I’d questioned his trustworthiness. “I’m going to take her off there,” he repeated.

  “Let me sleep on it,” I said. After all, I’d had a really tiring day. And I’d just talked to a married girlfriend who has been looking at an old (also married) boyfriend’s Facebook wall wondering if he is intending to send her secret messages through his posts, a conversation I’d neglected to share with John.

  He reluctantly agreed to wait.

  In the morning, after waking to several bad dreams during the night, I got up and walked straight into the office. I turned on the computer, then picked through the trashcan, unfolding every little blue note I could find without making too much noise. With no password found and horrified that John would hear me if I dumped the entire contents onto the floor, I went back to the bedroom. The sun was coming up, and John was stirring.

  “Honey.”

  “Uh-huh,” he answered.

  “I’m still having a hard time with this Cindy thing.”

  “I will get her off there today.”

  “Thanks, baby,” I said, climbing into bed with him. “I’m really sorry.”

  John held me, hugged me, and kissed me on the forehead.

  That day while I was at work, John wrote to Cindy and explained to her, honestly, like I encouraged him to do, that his wife is a jealous lunatic (in so many words). When I got home, he relayed to me that she understood, that her husband works with a lot of “hot, young babes” and it bothers her, but she’s never told him.

  “Give your wife a hug for me,” she’d said.

  “Damn,” I said, “she’s even nice.”

  So is my husband, especially to me. And he loves me, only me, for eternity. I have five more years to get that . . . and to get over this jealousy thing. He may have to extend that deadline.

  — Ande Cardwell

  Three Little Words

  In the beginning, three little words followed us everywhere we went. To the movies. Restaurants. That silly beach bar where the guitar player strummed Jimmy Buffett songs. Even down by the river, where we walked each night, jeans rolled up to our knees, hands lightly touching. Three little words.

  I love you.

  They were there on our wedding day with fifty people drinking mimosas at 11:00 a.m. as the river-boat sauntered down the coast. Paddlewheel churning. Wedding guests laughing. A singer crooning “Unforgettable.” We danced so close I could feel your warm breath like fingers on the back of my neck.

  I love you.

  They were even there when you carried me over the threshold into our new cookie-cutter house. Magnolia trees dotted the lawns, and everyone had matching black mailboxes with little red flags. Perfect, we thought.

  I love you.

  The children came soon after that. A boy first, quiet and cuddly. Then a girl, colicky, screaming even as you swaddled her. The words still came back then. But they didn’t show up as often anymore. When they did, they sounded weary and spent and muttered into a pillow case.

  I . . . love . . . you.

  I don’t know when it happened really. There wasn’t a particular moment in time. But one day I noticed the words were gone. Not completely. But gone like old friends who’d moved away, promising to come back and visit. Just as soon as soccer season ended. Or a work deadline passed. Or someone got over the flu. It’s amazing how life can hum along even without old friends. Without those three little words.

  We moved into a bigger house, a two-story with ivy that scaled the red brick. You liked the game room upstairs and t
alked about adding a pool table and shooting eight-ball on Friday nights. But that was before the kids filled the room with their roller blades and bicycle helmets and video play stations. Soon the pool table became just another one of those things that parents dream about, like uninterrupted sleep or car seats without Cheerios stuffed in the cracks.

  You started to spend a lot of time working outside, baking in the Florida heat, edging the corners of our lawn into perfect 90-degree angles. That’s when the new words started to come around. Curious, at first. A little too friendly. Like uninvited neighbors. They’d watch while you power-washed the driveway and sheared the ivy from the brick. Three new words.

  He’s a keeper.

  I’d nod in agreement. They were right, after all. I’d let those new words sit for a while, sipping lemonade, talking about the weather. I’d try to get comfortable with them, to make them feel at home. Then something would interrupt the lazy afternoon. A child’s splinter. A phone ringing. Our dog busting out the front door. I’d have to excuse myself and bolt down the block, because Mrs. Reilly had taken out her broom already and was getting dangerously close to the terrier squatting on her front lawn. I’d run in circles trying to catch that crazy dog. Just when I was almost ready to let Mrs. Reilly take a whack at him, you’d come running up behind me. Leash in hand. Pieces of ivy still stuck to your arms.

  He’s a keeper.

  So I let the new words in. I got comfortable with them. Over time, I came to appreciate their steadiness. Their predictability. The way they never let me down. Even though they didn’t sparkle or take my breath away.

  Years passed. Jobs came and went. We dished out money for prepaid college plans and two sets of braces, for horseback riding lessons and broken arms, and for 2,041 teenage text messages. And long after we’d accepted that these comfortable words were enough, that it was okay that the “I love yous” only wanted to come around for birthdays and anniversaries . . . we got the call.

  Nobody is prepared for that call. Nobody can imagine what it’s like to lay on that cold, metal table day after day. To wait for the buzzer to sound and for beams of radiation to pass through tight red skin. Nobody is prepared for the surgery, either. To lose a piece of herself. To feel that sharp twinge in those last fleeting moments just before unconsciousness, when every fiber pulses with the same three words.

  I’m not ready!

  You were at my bedside when I awoke. Holding my hand. Stroking my hair. You pretended not to notice when the bandages came off, when it became obvious that even with reconstructive surgery, I would never look exactly the same again. That’s when you kissed me, right there in the hospital, right at the very moment when I felt the most unkissable. And that’s when I knew. Three new words.

  I need you.

  As I healed, you learned how to cook chicken paprikash. To shuttle kids to band practice. To fold laundry into neat, fluffy stacks. You learned how to correct algebra problems. To write limericks. To braid a girl’s hair. And to my surprise, you learned when to draw back the shades and tell me about all those little things that happened during the day. And when to say nothing at all.

  I need you.

  In time, I grew strong again. Strong enough to reclaim my place, to fall back into my old routine. But as I did, I began to notice something: How wonderful bakery bread smelled. How winning a game of Yahtzee could make me feel good all day long. How everything that had seemed so dull and tedious before seemed to sparkle now.

  That discovery made me want to take a walk with you. A walk down by the river, with jeans rolled up to our knees, hands lightly touching. I could feel the sun’s warmth slipping away and the soft moss beneath my feet. You stopped to skip a stone across the glassy water. That’s when our eyes met, so much older now, wrinkled at the corners by every twist and turn of life. For a moment, the wind seemed to still. The leaves hushed. Songbirds quieted. It was as if they were all watching and waiting . . . wanting the words to come. Those three little words.

  But instead you took my hand and we walked away in silence, past the crook where we used to stop, farther than we’d ever gone before. We walked without words because the silence seemed to be enough. Because all the growing and changing and accepting had made our love become something more than three little words.

  So much more.

  — Madeleine M. Kuderick

  When His and Hers Becomes Ours

  Last year, after ten years of dating, my boyfriend moved in with me. Our respective children are nearly out of the house or about to leave. They’ve been alternately amusing and needy, lovely and obstinate, fun and exhausting, and now it’s time for us. Yes, we’re finally having our own grown-up adventure.

  Make that groan up.

  You never get the full flavor of someone’s personality until you’re sharing the same space — linen closet, bathtub, packed-to-the-gills garage, mailbox, and recycling bins — 24/7.

  After fifteen years on my own following a divorce, I’m sharing space again with a man: a small ranch with galley kitchen, a combined living/dining area, and a master bedroom no bigger than some friends’ mud rooms.

  Tonight, I’m holed up in my daughter’s former bedroom, now my study, because I’m mad at my guy. Usually, he’s thoughtful and considerate. He brings me coffee every morning, calls me at work daily, and does the food shopping, a task he knows I dislike. He’s patient to a fault and a great listener. Yes, he’s a catch. So what’s the catch?

  He can be inflexible. He’s a neatnik who likes to point out others’ messes. He gets angry and won’t talk; in other words, he’s perfected the art of stone-walling. It’s a tricky, sometimes dangerous, trifecta.

  Tonight, he’s accused me once again of making a muddle of the kitchen cabinet above our sink. True, I’ve sneaked back in the set of bright orange plastic drinking glasses he hates, strewn matchbooks and incense sticks all over, and — I freely admit — defiantly placed, front and center on the bottom shelf, a jar of honey-mustard pretzel-dipping sauce he explicitly said to toss. The offending jar, nothing we’ll ever use, is the first thing you spot when opening the cabinet door.

  “I see you’ve made a mess of this again,” he said earlier while dishing up some leftovers. A casual comment, perhaps, but it got my goat.

  So here I sit, steaming, thinking about that old truism of relationships: Something I once found endearing about this man — his sock-sorting, pillow-plumping, silverware-straightening penchant for order — is the very same thing that makes me crazy now.

  Living together means sharing household items, easier promised than practiced. Take last winter. There we were, nestled by the fire on a snowy evening. My partner lay on the couch, my feet in his lap. The television clicker was positioned in hand.

  His hand.

  He clicked us through a parade of news, iceskating and HGTV shows, and a Gilligan’s Island rerun. When the Bette Midler tearjerker, Beaches, flashed on screen, I yelled, “Stop!” And then, the four words that strike the most fear in a man’s heart: “Give me the clicker.”

  To my astonishment, he kept clicking.

  “You’re not going to give it to me?” I said, where-upon, smiling Cheshire Cat-like, he strengthened his grip around the black device.

  “What do you need it for?” he asked, his knuckles turning a paler shade of white.

  I saw, in that moment, a side of my loving, evolved, progressive guy I’d rarely seen: Cro-Magnon. I was suddenly reminded of the fact that in the first photo I ever took of him, he was curled in a club chair, clicker in hand.

  I rustled myself out of my sleepy position. “I want it.”

  “Why?’ he asked this time.

  I could feel my anger grow as I watched him clutch the plastic gadget even tighter. I never knew he had such strong palm control or such dogged determination about matters so inconsequential. Disgusted, I got up and stalked off to the bedroom, to another TV and a clicker of my own.

  He thought I was being childish. I thought him unreasonable and, well
, controlling.

  Stalemate.

  A part of me feels foolish even mentioning our remote-control tiff. Eventually, we talked. We walked it off. We laughed. Some relationships sizzle, some offer an oasis of calm. Ours? It’s true that when we click, we click. He made a peace offering of the remote every night after that. (Beaches, anyone?)

  Living together means sharing decisions. Again, easier said than done; easier when you are in two separate houses, his and yours. Harder when you’re both living in yours and you’ve got an old swimming pool that neither of you uses or wants to maintain.

  The pool liner is leaking; the cover is ancient. It’s time for a little TLC. Or is it? It will cost us thousands to get the pool looking spanking new and working flawlessly again. Clearly, my swimming pool and I have arrived at that point where all complicated relationships end up sooner or later: commit to the long haul or break up.

  Despite the costs, I would like to keep the pool. After fourteen years together, we’ve got history. My partner thinks otherwise. He promises me apple and pear trees, flowering bushes, a deck, if only I’d agree to excavate. He’ll build me a little cottage-studio where I can make art, or perhaps we could enjoy some other form of luxurious liquid, like a pond with fish, Japanese water garden, or fountain.

  “Don’t rule those out; they are beautiful,” he says, upping the ante in his efforts to change my mind.

  “We’ll see,” I say. I can stonewall, too.

  Living together means sharing the thing that enlarges the more you give it away: love. And there are many ways to demonstrate it.

  “Remind me to put a jacket on the water heater,” my guy says, stepping out of the shower, which, he notes, is running tepid.

  I wait a beat for the follow-up wisecrack, the punch line, the laugh at my expense. We are hopeless kidders. But his face is so open; his tone, guileless. He isn’t joking.