marriage issues

On Marriage


I was supposed to write a post on marriage for 50 Something, the grog where I am a contributer. It was a response to an article in The Atlantic Journal by a writer/performer/blogger named Sandra Tsing Loh. She’s getting divorced. Not because she is a lazy Gen-X with delusions of having it all, as long as the all doesn’t include any drudgery like working on her relationship, but because marriage is an outmoded and impractical institution whose very existence is why people cannot manage to commit and stay together. Or something like that.

But then, the governor of South Carolina went hiking the Applachian Trail in Brazil and proved to be a horrid author of bad love letters, Farrah died – which is somehow pivotal to my inner child and Michael Jackson super-nova’d all over the media providing me with a chance to show a cruel heartless side of myself I usually reserve for the widdas.

Of course a child-free weekend and a wedding anniversary may have played into this too, but somehow the whole marriage piece didn’t get written.

And then someone else did a much better job than I could have and I thought, Meh, why revisit it? It’s not as if I have vast experience to draw on.

It was then that it occurred to me that just being married didn’t make me any more of an expert on marriage than being widowed made me a role model for other grieving people. Ultimately our paths through life are hacked through life’s jungle with painstaking perseverance and intestinal fortitude.

But I did go back and reread Ms. Tsing Loh’s article. She was married for twenty years and I wondered what possessed a person to walk away from a mate who wasn’t engaged in any deal-breaking activity. Perhaps I had judged her too harshly?

And a quick second through convinced me I hadn’t.

Marriage was just too much work. Work that, on a rating scale, fell after the maintenance of children, home and career. Marriage, apparently, is supposed to sustain itself forever and ever on the initial burst of lust and Disney Princess fervor from which it began. If it can’t, it wasn’t meant to be.

And certainly some relationships have a shelf life. Tsing Loh’s probably falls in the category of those unions that haven’t anywhere to go, but is it grown up to recognize, own it and move on or have an affair, blame it on hunter/gatherer DNA and trash marriage in general?

I approach my marriage as a work in progress. A masterpiece revealing itself to be a mural to rival Monet’s lillies. It will take as much forever as I am allowed to see it all and whatever work is involved is, therefore, worth the time and effort.

Anyway, I’d have written something like that if I hadn’t been distracted by life.

Damned If You Do


I read The Globe and Mail fairly regularly. One of the columnists, Sarah Hampson, has a semi-regular feature on relationships with a tendency to view marriage as a glass half empty. Because she is divorced, she focuses about half or more of her columns on divorce – the process and the aftermath. She is playing to her strength and the fact that divorce is one of the most common of denominators in many people’s lives anymore. Cynicism shouldn’t be a given, but she has a jaundiced eye. There are many divorced people who do not cast such a world-weary glance at the institution of marriage or love in general, but she isn’t one of them – though she will give credit where it is due.

Her most recent piece was on the Obamas’ Broadway date night and their tendency to promote their marriage as a successful one – which by all accounts it is. Her issue though is that they don’t air the dirty laundry as much as they try too hard to put a good face on their relationship, or at least that is what I read between the lines. She feels that the Obamas are being disingenuous.

Interestingly, I ran across a blog piece the other night that said much the same thing only the targets were ordinary bloggers who write about themselves. The blogger questioned whether the women whose blogs she reads are really telling the truth about their relationships, mothering experiences or their sublime contentment with being single. The writer thought that perhaps they were fudging and putting on airs to maintain a façade in a game of one upmanship because … I don’t know … because if you are chronicling your life in the blogosphere (or living it in the public eye as the President and First Lady do) and you are not doing it reality tv show style – with dysfunction being the main ingredient – then you are not real? You are faking it? Happiness and contentment are not common? Misery and longing is the major theme of most lives? Real relationships have sticky thorn-like issues? The average single person would rather not be*?

I have touched on this subject a time or two. Recently even. And I don’t think I am deliberately cultivating a façade because I keep private details about my marriage and my children private. There is no fourth wall in blogging, but each blogger does establish boundaries with their audience. I can be as revealing (some would say TMI) as John and Kate, but the truth is, I don’t want to, and Rob and I are so not John and Kate and so not interested in being so. We do not have a dramatic life. We are two remarkably well-suited mates who live a pretty ordinary life that just happened to have an unusual beginning. If anything, I feel a bit guilty FOR BEING happy, content and right where I belong. It’s not as if this has always been the case and I marvel often how I ended up just exactly where I should be. 

I am not Dooce and my motivation for blogging is, as it has mostly always been, about writing. 

What I think Ms. Hampson and the blogger are about is projection. A Facebook acquaintance recently  posted an update that read,

“It’s all about them. It’s all about them.”

And what he meant was that regardless of how your life manifests in the public sphere, others will interpret it through their own experiences and the spot in life where they are currently residing and make whatever is going on about whatever is happening in someone else’s life about what is not going on in their own.

Ms. Hampson, for example, is divorced and writes about the experiences of the divorced and all the other downer topics that consume the single. Since I was single a long, long time,  I know those gray-colored lenses through which she peers and how they tint the landscape with a pessimistic and cynical hue. Naturally, she would see the Obamas’ as posing, flaunting and perhaps even trying to hard. It looks like that when you haven’t had a relationship that really fit.

My dear friend Cissy, whom I have known for twenty years and is the big sister I had to go out and find, has a marriage that to anyone not privy looks effortless and loving. It is certainly the latter. Cissy and her husband were my role models. Had I never met them, I wouldn’t have married at all because I didn’t learn much about marriage from my own parents beyond endurance. But Cissy’s marriage is not effortless. There has been ebb and flow and back again during their 25+ years. I have not been privy to the details but I have been assured time and again that issues come up and are dealt with and it stays between them. Where it belongs.

Here’s what I learned about marriage – quickly – that the person you talk to when things are at ebb tide is your spouse. People who “poll the audience”, so to speak, do themselves no favors and their relationships much harm.

I never discussed Will and I with anyone really. Things that came up stayed between us. And we worked at making time for each other and communicating regularly throughout our day and allowing each other space and individuality. I brought these lessons with me when I began dating Rob, and he in turn brought with him the very similar things he’d learned from his marriage to Shelley. And key to this? Our relationship is about us. 

I am a writer. A blogger. I open small windows into my daily life just like everyone else in my genre. Just excerpts. Little splices really. It might seem like an Obama photo op, but I don’t think the world is a worse place because happy, successful couples share their lives. It is certainly healthier than the Spencer and Heidi’s of the world. Or the John and Kate’s. Give me a First Couple who date after 16 years of marriage and obviously delight in one another any day.

 

*My Auntie is 78 years old and never married. She will be the first to admit that she has known lonliness, knows it still from time to time, but she is not sorry she never married. She has more friends than my mother – and that is a feat – and she is never home between her social life, her volunteering and the army of devoted nieces and nephews who include her in every family function imaginable. And Auntie is not an isolated example. I know people in my own peer group and even people in the blogosphere who are not lamenting the single life. All life choices have an up as well as a downside and nothing can ever be said to be permanent.

The Devil You Don’t Know


There was a point – before Will was diagnosed – when I spent a lot of time and energy trying to hide what was going on in our marriage from everyone. My family. My co-workers. The neighbors. For over a year, I was on red alert and damage control where he was concerned. It would shock you to know some of the details. I look back now and realize I should have left and not worried about where the chips would fall because the thing about chips is that they can be picked up, put away again, or simply swept out with the trash. The chips are just details.

My biggest fears were ridiculous in retrospect, but I know that focusing on them helped me deal, indirectly, with the larger truth which was that Will was really sick and there would be no fixing him. I was buying myself time.

And I wished him dead. I don’t know how many times I just asked the powers that be to simply let me wake up to a phone call or a knock on the front door announcing he had killed himself or been in a fatal accident. It was, ironically, a more innocent time for me when I could believe that his death would actually make me feel better. Nonsense too in retrospect. It would have solved the more pressing issues but would have been worse in the longer run in more ways than not.

I am thrown back there today by a phone call from my dearest best girlfriend who helped me so much through Will’s illness and was my staunchest support after his death. Not to go into too many details, but her marriage is dicey. Things are going on, and have the potential to go on, that make me afraid for her and her kids.

As I listened to her talk, I could hear myself way back when, rationalizing and trying to control a situation that was  beyond me instead of doing what needed to be done. And I can understand and empathize completely because I have been right there where she is, a place I would not wish on anyone.

It took two stays in the psych ward for Will for me to mobilize and do what needed to be done. And a lot of tragic things could have happened while I dithered. One did in that we didn’t find out what was wrong until it was too late to do anything about it.

My friend and her husband got married a few months before Will and I did. They are celebrating their tenth soon. It’s something that has been on my mind too. Ten years. It’s a long time. Between my marriages I don’t have ten years as a wife.

One thing I have learned is that it is too easy to talk yourself off the right path because some of the initial decisions require heavy lifting and letting go – of ideas, people, dreams, or just the stuff you’ve accumulated over time that seems more important and necessary than it really is. 

There is a long soliloquy in Hamlet where he contemplates and then rejects the idea of suicide. He reasons that it is better to stay with the known troubles of his life than to foolishly rush off into the “undiscovered country” of the after life which could as easily be worse than what he is facing. In his case he talked himself back onto the right path but still let inertia and fear keep him from the actions he knew he had to take and so ended up losing everything anyway. I hope my friend has not waited too long.