I have had two conversations in the last two weeks that have really made me think about marriage. One was by the mailbox, with my neighbor, who was surprised to learn that I didn’t know her 18 year old daughter had eloped with a GI. “I think she’ll live to regret it, but what can you do?”, she said with all the hope she could muster. I’ve known Maeve since she was a year old, watched her grow up, mourned the sudden passing of her father when she was five (he dropped dead of a cerebral aneurysm), had her babysit my boys…. I knew she was impulsive, but I never expected her to elope. She’s a romantic, and I think has always missed the presence of a man in her life. This is, I suppose, one way to get that. At least she finished high school, and thanks to the Running Start program, has an AA degree….
The other conversation was with a woman who is pushing a different limit. Like so many, she has realized she made the wrong choice, but is trying to protect her young kids. She hasn’t really been a part of the work force, so her options are a little more limited. But beyond that, she would really like to have it all. So she is experimenting with having it all. She and her (ex?)Husband are sharing the same living space, and all the child care details. They remain friends. They are not polyamorous, well, at least not in the traditional sense. She has a lover (who also has a semi-estranged wife, in another country) and he has at least one other lover. They do not share a bed themselves. Respect, co-parenting, stability; this is what she shares with her (first?) husband. With her lover, she has a deep passionate relationship, and the freedom to explore. I’m not sure what to think. I envy her in some ways, but can’t help thinking it’s a house of cards, built on the goodwill of both distanced spouses. All the fun in one camp, and all the work in the other? How long can that last? It isn’t prudishness on my part; it’s skepticism, I think. Everyone always points to the French and their notoriety for mistresses. For every mistress, however, there’s a wife somewhere who isn’t getting enough attention, isn’t there? I’ve always thought that if you didn’t want to be married, you should get un-married, which I realize is never as easy as it sounds.
This got me thinking about a lot of things. I’ll begin on Maeve’s end: the proposals….
“Marry me”, Alex. said, about 6 months after we met at a lame Girl Scout function in Page County. Well, strictly speaking, he wasn’t at it, he and a friend were crashing it, having been drawn, no doubt, by the bonfire surrounded by singing teen-aged girls. Steph and I had grown weary of Kum-bah-Yah and drawn back under a picnic shelter to giggle about more interesting subjects when Alex and his friend materialized out of the darkness. He was a big guy with curly blonde hair and a straight toothed smile. We had enough time to chat and exchange phone numbers before the leaders noticed our absence and their presence, and forced Steph and I back to the fire.
Alex and I talked for hours every night, me in my big yellow beanbag chair, luxuriating in the unlimited phone time I had, now that I had bought my own phone line with wages earned at the local Presbyterian Conference Synod Retreat Center. My father, always on call at the local hospital, would never let us have more than three minutes on the family line, and really, what can be said in three minutes? Alex and I talked about everything: High School, music, books, the meaning of life, unicorns and rainbows, all that good stuff. He was captain of his football team. I was involved in so many activities. His mother adored me. But it was hard to see each other; I didn’t have my license yet, and he had to borrow a car. So the proposal really caught me off guard. I mean, I was barely 15! Even in the Valley, that seemed young, and I had Plans. Big ones. Of course I was going to college. I wanted to see the world. Why would I get married?
He didn’t take “no” well. It seemed that he wanted to know that I was going to be his, forever and always, or there was just no point. Take it or leave it. Sadly, I left it. His mom still called me for about a year, every now and then, just to touch base, hoping, I guess, that maybe I’d come around. But for what? Life in one small town forever? It sounded like prison! It wasn’t until two years later, that Paula explained to me, as I looked at the stack of pre-engagement rings filling the ring holder on her vanity, that if you were engaged, or pre-engaged, it was okay to sleep with your boyfriend. OOOOOHHHH. I was so naïve. It wouldn’t have mattered, as I was at that time “saving myself” for someone, or something, to be named later in a trade….. but it would have been nice to know.
A few summers later, I was walking along a beach by the Rio Plata with Ricardo when he proposed. It had been our neighborhood’s night for the aparagon, the rolling blackout that kept Montevideo’s electrical grid in the pink. This week’s gathering had been at my host family’s house, and we played chanchi, a card game with spoons. That inspired me to teach everyone to hang spoons on their noses, something which apparently had never occurred to my friends in Uruguay. We ate a cold supper and drank too much mate′, the uber- caffeinated tea that is their national drink, the right way, from the gourd. Too wired to sleep, we were still up at three, walking along the beach. The stars were gorgeous; I had never seen Scorpio so low and bright in the sky. “Are you crazy?” I shot back at him. Mate′ is like that, you have these bursts of energy where you can’t slow down and say exactly what you are thinking. “You and Ilsa are totally in love, why would you propose to me?” “Because”, he responded gravely, “If I marry you, I can go back to the United States, and be free to think, and speak as I wish, and study at the University, not engineering, but philosophy. I can be my own man. You and I are good together. We could be happy.” “Ricardo, my friend, I adore you, we can talk about anything, but I am not in love with you, and you know this. That is not a good reason to marry. And it would destroy Ilsa. Already she looks at me as if I were the devil.” “It is what I expected you to say,” he replied, “But I had to ask. If I don’t get out of this crazy repressive country, I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t want to be one of the disappeared ones, like Milton’s brother.” I shuddered. It was true. Every family I had met had a disappeared one, someone of whom they could not speak, they dared not name. A new government was in place, but who knew what that meant, what it would bring? One still had to be very careful. My heart went out to him. There must be some other way to get him out! I was almost 17, but definitely not ready to marry, even as a sham. I was headed to college, and my parents would never see marriage as a sham. They saw it as a lifelong commitment. If I brought Ricardo home, there would be Hell to pay. “I’m sorry”, I whispered, as we turned to walk back down the beach towards my host family’s house. “There’s nothing I can do.”
My first year of college was drawing to a close. It had been a strange sort of year, treading water to fulfill my father’s fantastic notion that spending my first year away from home at a Bible college would somehow imprint good behavior indelibly in my brain. It wasn’t a bad year. I had a great roommate in Darlene; I got to study Hebrew, which is a fascinating language, and the Psalms as poetry. It’s enormously freeing to take classes when you know they aren’t going to count, so I didn’t bother with any of the usual freshman crap, and I learned a lot watching all the gals who came to school to get their MRS. Degree. The guys in the Christian Rock Band were my other pals, except the wrong one fell in love with me. It should have been Theodore: we were both high energy and mischievous. But he went for my friend Cathy. What can you do? That left me with Scott, a really nice guy, bass player, good kisser, thoughtful. As a group, we had a lot of fun.
I should have known better than to pull the phony engagement prank, but I couldn’t resist. In the spring, couples sprouted diamonds like tulips pushing up through the snow. That’s what happens when sex waits for marriage, and the only major for women is church music, I guess. Anyway, about every other night, some little chickadee would come bouncing into the girl’s dorm, holding her left hand high, and shrieking like the proverbial banshee. It was getting nauseating. So Cathy, Darlene and I were snickering about it one night, and we said, wouldn’t it be easy to fake it? Oh that would be so funny, everyone gets all worked up, like this is the ultimate thing in your existence. Eye rolling. Gagging noises. Since Scott and I were the most obvious couple, and I was the most devil-may-care, I volunteered. The next night, while we were out at “our” spot by the dumpsters which overlooked the city, I warned Scott that he might get thrown in the showers, which was the tradition for newly engaged boys. I came in just at curfew, holding my empty left hand and screaming like a banshee. I dove into my room, and locked the door. It worked. The fat cow whose room/dresser/mirror backed up to our mirror was on top of her dresser, banging on the mirror, demanding to see the ring. Darlene, who was supposed to be in the room to jump up and down and scream with me, was instead fighting with her boyfriend Frank, on the payphone in the hall. She got back and reported that Scott had, indeed, gotten thrown in the showers. Isn’t gossip amazing? How did the news get to the boys dorm so fast when there were no cell phones, no room phones, and only two pay phones, one of which was occupied by Darlene? Of course I had to ‘fess up the next day, but it still makes me giggle to think about. That was really all these women could think about, when will someone ask me to marry them? Who will be next? What a sad existence that must have been, must still be for those who live it.
It got sadder, of course. Scott didn’t want me to leave. He really thought I should marry him and stay in Ohio. Why would anyone want to go to the West Coast? Crazy place, that. No telling what people would do, or what might happen. As it happened, Mt. St. Helens blew within twelve hours of my arrival in Washington. But that’s another story. I couldn’t marry Scott and stay anymore than I could marry Alex. It felt so much like I had become a butterfly that men wanted to pin on their collecting boards. Was that what marriage was? If your goals differ from mine, you should marry me, and then you’ll have to give in to my ideas?
That pattern seemed to hold for a while. If I got in a relationship that lasted any time at all, I seemed to be a butterfly. I was the first woman Robert had ever asked out; he took such chances for me, learned to love the theatre, bought tickets to concerts he knew I would love, for bands he’d never heard of, ate food he questioned highly….but while we could talk philosophy, and argue about religion and politics, we had no shared life direction. I couldn’t marry him! I was still a butterfly. I sort of got out of the habit of relationships for a while; it seemed too difficult to manage wanting to be owned.
Much later, after too many years of college, finally a nurse, and living on my own, the tables turned. I met Laurence. I’ve never been so completely overwhelmed by someone, so totally in love, before or since. “Stricken” hardly covers it. Even as I realized he was dangerous for me, I didn’t care. I wanted him. He was smart, he was funny, he was interesting, he was a great lover. You never knew what would happen when you were with him. We had a torrid few weeks, I met his family, and he ambled off to go to the Defense Language Institute in San Francisco to learn Russian for reasons that were never entirely clear to me. He no more belonged in the Army than I belonged in a nunnery. I was working evenings, and 12-hour shifts, so I had long weekends often. I would get off work on Wednesday at 11 pm, with the car packed already, and start driving. I could be there by 1pm the next day if the Siskiyou pass was good to me. Whispered long distance phone calls, hot weekends, the loneliness of an Army barracks for him: no one really pays attention to the details. We spent the holidays together, what bliss! Then I got the chance to do traveling nursing. In Hawaii. Who could say no to that? I left my car with Laurence in SF, sublet my apt. in Seattle, and flew to the islands. That turned out to be a little too much distance. The time difference meant phone calls had to be planned, things like that. Suddenly, they didn’t happen. It turned out the king of spontaneous fun didn’t do planning. Who knew? By the time my three month stint was up, it was clear we had troubles, but I knew that would all clear up once we were in the same location for a while. It was a distance thing, it had to be. His stay at DLI was also up, so our plan was to have a romantic drive up through the wine country, time to catch up, tune up. But when I got to San Fran, suddenly it was me and 8 of his college friends, who had somehow shown up to make the trip. I knew and liked them, but WTF? Off we went. The trip was fun. We stumbled into wineries off the beaten track, met vintners somehow who usually weren’t available, and had marvelous tastings. Laurence didn’t plan, but somehow things worked out. Laurence didn’t have a job. Laurence didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up. But he was brilliant. He was talented. He could do whatever he set his mind to doing, he just needed motivation. I was sure the motivation was me. I knew that I could support us until he wrote the great American novel, or became a professor, or whatever. I didn’t care if he married me, but I thought for sure he would move into my tiny basement flat, and we would start to get his life in gear. But he didn’t. He moved on. I was crushed. I was devastated, heartbroken, flabbergasted, destroyed, all those unhappy words. I couldn’t understand it. We were so good together. I was going to give him the platform he needed to become whatever he wanted to become, and he was rejecting it, and me, outright. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, until months later, when I was having lunch with his mother ( I always got along so well with the mothers) and she said to me, “the problem was, you wanted to “do Laurence”, and he doesn’t want to be anyone’s project”. I hadn’t wanted a butterfly, I had wanted an ant farm.
“I want you to be the person sitting next to me on the porch drooling at the old folk’s home,” said my husband-to- be one lazy Sunday morning in bed over coffee and the paper, in what constituted his proposal of marriage. That was pretty much it, no skywriting over Husky stadium, no ring in a Cracker Jack box, or love poem written in rose petals on a swanky hotel room floor. Somehow, though, it packed a greater sincerity than a lot of the other things that had been said to me over the years. Maybe because by thirty something I had developed a healthy skepticism of mainstream media romance, maybe because it showed that he had a grasp of what the long haul actually meant, I don’t know, but I felt like that statement rated some serious consideration. He seemed to be able to want to be with me without needing to own me, and willing to let me have as much room as I needed. We were thinking along the same lines regarding children, were religiously, politically and in intellectually compatible, and had fun when we were together. So we married.
Nookie, green cards, security, romance, challenge, boredom, butterflies and ant farms, the need to know with whom you will spend national holidays; all of these can motivate proposals. But what makes a marriage work? I have often asked myself this question. Obviously it has a lot to do with equality. Dear Abby and Ann Landers assure us it is all about communication. It has a lot to do with shared goals, values, and direction. But are some people happy to be butterflies, or ant farms? Do trophy wives set out to be trophies, or do they think it’s love? Does everyone realize the trade off they are making when they make it?
For me, being a butterfly was out of the question, as was marrying in my teens. In the South of my childhood, marriage had to at least be on the table for sex to enter the equation. For the ladies at CBC, clearly marrying young was not just okay; it meant freedom from the workforce. I have friends who accepted without question arranged marriage. I know folks who have made serial marrying a sport and others who have stuck with unions so awful that their own children encouraged them to split. We all know people who break up to make up, and for whom drama is as an essential part of the equation as absolute calm is for others.
When my married for 15 years+ friends and I get together to jaw, the one thing we can all agree on is that marriage is nothing like what we thought it would be. And a surprising number of us say that if it weren’t for the children, we’re not sure we would bother to do it at all. Really, in this day and age, is this a necessary institution if progeny and landed estates aren’t an issue? If the only question is companionship, marriage may not be the answer. Aside from the whole with whom shall I spend national holidays question, how reasonable is it to expect one person to meet all your needs for all your life? There’s a great plaque in one of the silly catalogs that continually fill my mailbox. It says: There are five essentials in a woman’s life: 1. Every woman needs a man who is useful around the house and can hold down a job. 2. Every woman needs a man who can make her laugh and show her a good time. 3. Every woman needs a man who rocks her world, cares for her and makes her feel special. 4. Every woman needs a man who listens and understands, and isn’t condescending. 5. It is absolutely essential that none of these men ever meet each other. Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? What one person can reasonably do all that on a consistent basis? And so we settle for two or three out of four? What happens when you really need the other one or two of them?
My parents have been married for 52 years. I think this qualifies my mother for sainthood, even though her church does not recognize saints. My father is a wonderful, irritating, brilliant, argumentative, moody, inspirational, irascible man. He has dragged that poor woman through hell and back, criss-crossing the country, and proving that whole “for better or for worse” line in the traditional vows in ways I couldn’t have made up. Yet she carries on. And we all know that if she passes first, he won’t last a year, whereas she could clearly survive his passing by as long as her body holds out. She is the glue of his life. How does this happen? I’ve always wanted to ask her if he is her end all and be all, but I suspect she would hedge the answer.
I’ve come up with two answers to the “what makes it work?” question:
One is that offering or accepting an offer of marriage is as much a matter of timing as it is of anything else. The right person might come along with the right offer, but if you’re not at a place in your life where the idea of marriage seems like a good idea, it will never work. Even if, as Maeve seems to believe, it will bring you adventure.
The other is that keeping a marriage alive is as much a matter of sheer determination, stubbornness, if you will, perhaps more than anything else. You need to share a value system and all that, but if you don’t have the ability to just grimly hang on through the tough times, chances are your marriage will fall apart. This is what my other friend is facing, I think: A lack of determination to either fully participate or fully detach. In the end, I believe that must be the most painful place of all.
Clearly I’m not going to win the Romantic of the Year award. And I can’t predict how long my marriage, let alone anyone else’s will last. But I am stubborn. And a little wine never hurt either.
Dry Gin Martini, MD, another round, and don't be shy about it....
