When I first married, I expected my husband to be all things: sex object, professional sounding board, partner in parenting, constant companion. I pretended interest in everything he was interested in, and eventually some of them even interested me, like the New Deal and the New York Yankees. (I will never get on board with NASCAR.) The things I didn’t expect him to be were the ones that, in centuries past, had given the shape of a contract to matrimony, chief among them the transaction in which he made the money and I made the home. We had a partnership, all in all. Many of us blithely assumed this was a very good deal for everyone involved. The mental image of one of us wearing an apron and the other a suit, what the TV shows of our childhoods might have called the “Honey, I’m home” effect, seemed to imply an arid and empty existence. Poor her, with nothing to think about but the living room drapes and the tuna casserole. Poor him, with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Poor them, with little in common.
It turned out that some of this was hooey. Lots of those old-fashioned marriages were happy ones, in part because no one expected to look over and see their best friend in the adjoining twin bed. (Twin beds, we thought to ourselves!) And it turned out that some of the terms of the new egalitarian partnerships were not that great for those involved. It was difficult to grow up with one set of expectations and responsibilities, then to live through a societal bait-and-switch the likes of which no generation of men and women had ever seen before. My father has said from time to time that he wonders whether his marriage to my mother, the most domestic of spouses, could have survived the women’s movement and perhaps her determination to have a different sort of life. Once on a train I heard an older couple arguing heatedly and after a minute or two realized that the fight was about his habit of referring to the money he gave her each week as an allowance. “I am not a child, John,” she said, and nothing he could say jollied her out of a silence that hung over their two seats like a cloud until they disembarked in Baltimore.
My husband and I have together created three children, but we have separate finances, and that’s the way I like it. It’s not because, as Abigail Adams once wrote in her habitual harsh fashion, “All men would be tyrants if they could.” I’m just realistic: we’re not two hearts that beat as one. (In any marriage I’ve ever known in which two hearts beat as one, the one is his. Here’s to you, Abigail Adams.) Instead, we’re two strong-minded people who have divergent talents and habits. Gerry loves the fall and hates the heat; I prefer summer and I am sanguine about humidity. He’s not the least bit interested in celebrity gossip; it’s a really bad habit, and I’m sticking with it. He balances his checkbook, and I’m pretty sure that everything will come out okay at the end of the month. He believes in washing dishes by hand, and I’m a dishwasher zealot. When we first met I venerated the Beatles, he the Rolling Stones; I have to admit that over the years he’s brought me closer to Mick, not a bad place to be.
I used to joke that Gerry had never been known to apply heat to food, but since he started making oatmeal for both of us on winter mornings I’ve had to give up that allegedly humorous observation. He says he doesn’t cook because he doesn’t have to, given that I’m so good at it. That’s the kind of compliment you don’t even recognize as a compliment after a couple of decades together unless you take the time to hold it up to the light and let the sun shine through it.
Like bumper cars, each of us moves the other into unfamiliar territory a bit. Or not. As the comedian Rita Rudner says, “It’s great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.” We’re part of a mixed marriage: he’s male, I’m female. It’s not personal, it’s gender-based, like the conversations that go like this:
What did we decide about that dinner party the HooHas invited us to?
We talked about that the other night.
We did? Yes.
What did we decide?
Lord, all this has driven me nuts over the years. You never listen to me. You always forget. You never help. You always say that. You never do that. Petty grievances in marriage are like hothouse tomatoes: they get way bigger than they ought to, and they bear little resemblance to the real thing. A couple of years ago I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker in which, at the dinner table, wife says to husband, “Pass the salt, pass the salt—what am I, your slave?”
The term “soul mate”—which, I’m proud to say, I have never once used until now—suggests two people who have everything in common. But our gender, with all the differences it implies, divides us. That has its advantages: most of the men I know scarcely remember petty slights, while I nurse mine like kittens. My husband seems naturally inclined to cede certain areas of our family life to me. I can decorate any way I want as long as the big chair faces the flat-screen TV, with a table next to it for beer and cashews. And that’s just fine. Frankly, I don’t want a husband who knows what toile is. The one piece of furniture in whose purchase my husband actually participated was our first couch. It was so long ago that the couch cost a thousand dollars, so whenever I buy anything new and he asks how much it cost—an armoire, an Oriental rug, a six-burner gas stove that came in at around the same price as my first car—I say a thousand dollars. A safety net of small white lies can be the bedrock of a successful marriage. You wouldn’t believe how cheaply I can do a kitchen renovation. Neither would any kitchen renovator, including the one I actually used.
If you’re an inveterate reader you can’t help noticing that most great art evades all of this completely. Jane Austen wrote some of the finest books in the history of literature, but the unmarried novelist draws the blinds on every one of her protagonists once the vows have been uttered. (Only the secondary characters have long unions, and too often they are either stupid women and the men who married them for their now-faded beauty, or stupid men and the women who married them for their considerable fortunes.) Do the fireworks between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet that make Pride and Prejudice so incandescent result, ten years out, in slammed doors and sullen silences? We will never know, although the thought seems terrible. George and Martha tear at each other onstage in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, while Romeo and Juliet get a couple of good nights as teenagers, then die.
The trouble is that writing about a long and successful marriage is a little like writing about the newspaper business, which, not coincidentally, is also a line of work that doesn’t appear much in novels. There are signal moments, bursts of excitement, times of dislocation and distress, buried within long stretches of uneventful everyday. And over time those long stretches create something that is challenging to illustrate in movies or plays or books. They create a blanket of real life, woven day by day until the thing is all of a piece. “There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship,” Iris Murdoch wrote.
That’s what I didn’t understand when I married all those years ago. My vows were from Walt Whitman: “Camerado, I give you my hand. I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law. Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?” Okay, cut me a break: I was young, romantic, and hyperliterary. Mostly young. But I’m proud that I chose words that are as redolent of a long journey as they are of romantic love, because that’s ultimately what you wind up with, a journey that includes shared experience, setbacks, challenges, knowledge, and many many things that make you crazy as well as some things that make you happy. If a marriage is to endure over time, it has to be because both people within it have tacitly acknowledged something that young lovers might find preposterous: it’s bigger, and more important, than both of us. It’s love, sure, and inside jokes and conversational shorthand. But it’s also families, friends, traditions, landmarks, knowledge, history. It’s children, children whose parents’ marriage is bedrock for them even if they’re not children anymore. Perhaps especially if they’re not children anymore.
One night years ago we were having dinne
r with old friends who had young children, and I mocked the notion of staying together for the sake of the kids. The woman leaned across the table and hissed at me fiercely, “That’s a good reason to stay together.” When I had children of my own I knew what she meant: not that children required tolerance of a terrible union, but that blowing up their world demanded a particularly searching look at your rationale for doing so.
This is not a brief against divorce. I’ve known people so ill-matched that even at their weddings we figured they were on borrowed time. I’ve known couples who, apart, were more generous and supportive of each other than they ever managed to be in tandem. And any number of my friends have had what I think of as starter marriages, an early childless union that was like a sunspot that once darkened their lives and was effortlessly lasered off. It’s like my dad always told me about making pancakes: the first one just greases the grill and should be flipped right into the trash.
But I’ve also known couples who refused to break under weight that I assumed was crushing, couples who have weathered infidelity and tragedy and reversals of fortune. One of my friends, a psychologist, told me that the greatest determinant of whether a couple stays married is their determination to stay married; on the surface it sounded like a tautology, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me.
Everyone thinks they know what they’d do in all these situations, especially if they’ve never been in them themselves. But it’s certain that no one actually knows what goes on in a marriage except the two people involved, and often not even them. One of the most popular parlor games of my lifetime has been deconstructing the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the former president and the former First Lady, senator, presidential candidate, and secretary of state. Their imminent divorce has been predicted more often than the end of the world, and their continued union is explained by the cognoscenti in terms of political ambition. No one seems willing to allow that after all this time together, there may be something in their marriage for both of them, something deep and lasting and ultimately inexplicable. Maybe their marriage is flawed and fractured, and maybe it works for them. Or maybe they know what a divorced friend of mine admitted once, saying she had been too quick to end a union that was not wonderful but not terrible: “You think divorce is going to solve the problem, but it just creates a different set of problems.” As the actor Jeff Bridges said when asked the secret of staying married in Hollywood, “Don’t get divorced.”
One day in the barbershop I heard a bunch of guys mocking a young man who’d just left the shop. “Yeah, he’ll find out after he’s married,” one snickered about the kid’s moony attitude toward his girlfriend. All the others laughed, and various ball-and-chain comments followed. The thing to remember is that every one of those guys was married, and had been for a long time. In fact the barber himself spoke fondly, even fulsomely, to his wife during a phone call at some point in the middle of their marriage mockery. It made me wonder if our attitudes toward marriage are, in the last analysis, like what Winston Churchill once said of democracy: it’s the worst system except for all the others.
Sometimes I tell my children—well, actually, frequently I tell my children—that the single most important decision they will make is not where to live, or what to do for a living, it’s who they will marry. Part of this is the grandchild factor; I want mine to have two great parents if at all possible. But part is because the span of their years will be so marked by the life they build, day by day, in tandem with another. I fell for Gerry Krovatin when I was young and foolish because he looked great in a sports jacket, because he was a terrific dancer, because he was cool and smart and knew things I didn’t, which I scarcely thought possible. He is focused, diligent, and funny; I am distractible, peripatetic, sometimes overly earnest. He’s the first to criticize me privately and the first to defend me publicly. He has my back, and he always has. That’s not romantic, and it’s not lyrical, and it’s not at all what I expected when I thought I would never want to spend a night without him. (Today I like a good solo business trip with trash TV and a room service breakfast as much as the next long-married woman.) But at this stage in my life, I’m not interested in being with people who don’t have my back. All those I’m-just-telling-you-for-your-own-good types I knew when I was younger? Gone. There’s a tight circle of backers who remain, and he’s the backer-in-chief. He’s mainly Irish, which means loyalty is somewhere between a physical reflex and a neurological response. He holds a grudge against anyone who does me wrong. He may not remember our social schedule or the names of some of our kids’ friends, but he never forgets who wrote the bad review of my last book. And woe betide that individual if they ever meet him at a cocktail party. I like that in a man. Actually, I love that in a man.
Girlfriends
Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter. She may say that she’s learned to let unnecessary tasks ride, that she no longer worries too much about home-cooked meals or clean countertops, that her go-to outfit of black pants and colored jacket is always waiting at the front of the closet, that she gets her reading done by listening to audiobooks in the car and sends email messages from her phone while she’s having her hair cut.
But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, or, more important, her months and years, how she stays steady when things get rocky, who she calls when the doctor says “I’d like to run a few more tests” or when her son moves in with the girl she’s never much liked or trusted, she won’t mention any of those things. She will mention her girlfriends. The older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us—and love us despite what they know about us—are the joists that hold up the house of our existence. Everything depends on them.
I’m not sure I would have said that at an earlier time of my life. To be a good friend and to appreciate the value of friendship requires honesty and concentration. It took a long time for the two to come together for me as an adult.
When I think back, I realize that in my own life there was a girlfriend interregnum, a time during which I lost the knack for, the connection to, but never the need for close female friends. I remember my early college reunions, how there was the crackle of jockeying in the air: who had a good job, a good husband, a good family, a good life, who was accomplished and who was a sellout and was there a difference? Who looked good, better, different, the same? I remember the later reunions, how enjoyable they were, surrounded by smart women who had become what theorists call “the integrated self,” full of contradictions and compromises but at peace with both. Perhaps only when we’ve made our peace with our own selves can we really be the kind of friends who listen, advise, but don’t judge, or not too harshly. My friends now are more cheerleader than critic. They are as essential to my life as my work or my home, a kind of freely chosen family, connected by ties of affinity instead of ties of blood.
This has come full circle for me since I was a child. When I was very young and life was uncomplicated, my girlfriends were the center of my existence. At the requisite time we became obsessed with boys, but when the boys actually materialized we went silent, afraid of saying too much, saying something wrong, seeming to be something we couldn’t even put into words. (Smart? Strong? Perhaps I’m just projecting onto the past based on the present.) I had guy friends, and I still do, but it’s not the same: easier in some ways, less emotional and fraught, but less profound, too. “If something bad happens, I go to my women friends for advice and my male friends for distraction,” says my daughter.
When I was young it was when the boys weren’t around that the conversations swirled, lying on my living room rug listening to 45s, staring into the dark at sleepovers. One of the big events in our neighborhood was the Bonner fair, a carnival at the local Catholic high school to which, when we were a certain age, a boy would invite us on what, in the broadest possible sense, might be called a date. Here was the great thing about
the Bonner fair: talking about it for weeks in advance with your friends, planning what you were going to wear (something called an Ann-Margret blouse in a red bandanna print with ruffles that erupted at midbust, or would have if I’d actually been in possession of a bust at that time), getting dressed together, meeting up with the boys, talking about it afterward for weeks. The event itself was a blur of adrenaline and self-consciousness and, in my case, given how I feel about amusement park rides, nausea.
I spent two years of high school in a boarding school from which I was expelled; the school is no more but I’m still here, and I say that without jubilation since I was very happy there. It was a girls’ school and so female friendship was more than ever pivotal, although it was there that I first began to realize that there were women who didn’t like other women, who thought of them as poor substitutes until some guy came along. I also learned that, like marriages, many friendships are between people who are quite different and who fill in the unoccupied spaces in each other’s characters. Ergo, Angie, who got nabbed sneaking out at night along with me. I was mouthy and combative, and the nuns assumed I had cooked the whole adventure up, so I got the heave-ho. Angie was—still is—good, kind, and sweet-tempered, and she went on to be the school’s May Queen, to no one’s surprise, including my own. For years I thought this was unfair, but now I think it was exactly as it ought to have been, especially once I took mouthy and combative out into the great world and found that there it worked better for me than it had in convent school.
It would be easy to say that the friendship drought that began after I was kicked out of Mount de Chantal Visitation Academy was a function of moving from the cloistered convent to a coeducational public high school, and there’s probably some truth in that. There are endless studies that show that single-sex education, especially for girls, reinforces strength and diminishes the stranglehold of stereotypes, that it may lead girls toward everything from the study of mathematics to the pursuit of the Ph.D. I’ve realized that my attachment to girlfriends, the primacy of that bond, began to fray and disappear at the same time I decided I was no good at math. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Feminist theory has it that girls tamp down their authentic selves after they reach puberty and don’t really recover them until years later; when we turn away from who we are, we turn away from others like ourselves as well.