Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

  Okay, then, I thought, with a surge of relief. So she has made her peace with it all. Good.

  There was another moment of silence.

  Then my mother suddenly added, in a tone I'd never heard from her before, "But I do have to tell you something else. There are times when I refuse to even let myself think about the early years of my marriage and all that I had to give up. If I dwell on that too much, honest to God, I become so enraged, I can't even see straight."

  Oh.

  Therefore, the tidy ultimate conclusion is . . . ???

  It was slowly becoming clear to me that perhaps there was never going to be any tidy ultimate conclusion here. My mother herself had probably given up long ago trying to draw tidy ultimate conclusions about her own existence, having abandoned (as so many of us must do, after a certain age) the luxuriously innocent fantasy that one is entitled to have unmixed feelings about one's own life. And if I needed to have unmixed feelings about my mother's life in order to calm down my own anxieties about matrimony, then I'm afraid I was barking up the wrong tree. All I could tell for certain was that my mom had somehow found a way to build a quiet enough resting place for herself within intimacy's rocky field of contradictions. There, in a satisfactory-enough amount of peace, she dwells.

  Leaving me alone, of course, to figure out how I might someday construct such a careful habitat of my own.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Marriage and Autonomy

  MARRIAGE IS A BEAUTIFUL THING. BUT IT'S ALSO A

  CONSTANT BATTLE FOR MORAL SUPREMACU.

  --Marge Simpson

  By October 2006, Felipe and I had already been traveling for six months and morale was flagging. We had left the Laotian holy city of Luang Prabang weeks earlier, having exhausted all its treasures, and had taken to the road again in the same random motion as before, killing time, passing hours and days.

  We had hoped to be home by now, but there was still no movement whatsoever on our immigration case. Felipe's future was stalled in a bottomless sort of limbo that we had somewhat irrationally come to believe might never end. Separated from his business inventory in America, unable to make any plans or earn any money, utterly dependent on the United States Department of Homeland Security (and me) to decide his fate, he was feeling more powerless by the day. This was not an ideal situation. For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities. Felipe was no exception. He was becoming increasingly jittery, quick-tempered, irritable, and ominously tense.

  Even under the best of circumstances, Felipe has the bad habit of sometimes snapping impatiently at people he feels are either behaving poorly or interfering somehow with the quality of his life. This happens rarely, but I wish it would happen never. All over the world and in many languages I have watched this man bark his disapproval at bungling flight attendants, inept taxi drivers, unscrupulous merchants, apathetic waiters, and the parents of ill-behaved children. Arm waving and raised voices are sometimes involved in such scenes.

  I deplore this.

  Having been raised by a self-composed midwestern mother and a taciturn Yankee father, I am genetically and culturally incapable of handling Felipe's more classically Brazilian version of conflict resolution. People in my family wouldn't even speak this way to a mugger. Moreover, whenever I see Felipe fly off the handle in public, it messes around with my cherished personal narrative about what a gentle and tender-hearted guy I have chosen to love, and that, frankly, pisses me off more than anything else. If there is one indignity I shall never endure gracefully, it is watching people mess around with my most cherished personal narratives about them.

  What's worse, my yearning to have everyone in the world be best friends, combined with my near-pathological empathy for underdogs, often leaves me defending Felipe's victims, which only adds to the tension. While he expresses zero tolerance toward idiots and incompetents, I think that behind every incompetent idiot there lies a really sweet person having a bad day. All this can lead to contention between Felipe and me, and on the rare occasions that we argue, it is generally over such questions. He has never let me forget how I once forced him to walk back into a shoe store in Indonesia and apologize to a young salesclerk whom I felt he had treated rudely. And he did it! He marched back into that little rip-off of a shoe store and offered the bewildered girl a courtly expression of regret for having lost his temper. But he did so only because he found my defense of the salesclerk charming. I did not, however, find anything about the situation charming. I never find it charming.

  Blessedly, Felipe's outbursts are fairly uncommon in our normal life. But what we were living through right then was not normal life. Six months of rough travel and small hotel rooms and frustrating bureaucratic holdups were taking their toll on his emotional state, to the point that I felt Felipe's impatience rising to almost epidemic levels (though readers should probably take the word "epidemic" with a large grain of salt, given that my hypersensitivity to even the faintest human conflict makes me a thin-skinned judge of emotional friction). Still, the evidence seemed incontrovertible: He was not merely raising his voice at complete strangers these days, he was also snapping out at me. This really was unprecedented, because somehow Felipe had always seemed immune to me in the past--as though I, alone among everyone else on earth, was somehow preternaturally incapable of irritating him. Now, though, that sweet period of immunity seemed to have ended. He was annoyed at me for taking too long on the rented computers, annoyed at me for dragging us to see "the fucking elephants" at an expensive tourist trap, annoyed at me for planting us on yet another miserable overnight train, annoyed when I either spent money or saved money, annoyed that I always wanted to walk everywhere, annoyed that I kept trying to find healthy food when it was clearly impossible . . .

  Felipe seemed increasingly stuck in that awful breed of mood where any glitch or hassle whatsoever becomes almost physically intolerable. This was unfortunate, because traveling--particularly the cheap and dirty traveling we were undertaking--is pretty much nothing but one glitch and hassle after another, interrupted by the occasional stunning sunset, which my companion had evidently lost the ability to enjoy. As I hauled the ever more reluctant Felipe from one Southeast Asian activity to the next (exotic markets! temples! waterfalls!), he became only less relaxed, less accommodating, less comforted. I, in turn, reacted to his befouled humor the way I'd been taught by my mother to react to a man's befouled humor: by becoming only more cheerful, more upbeat, more obnoxiously chipper. I buried my own frustrations and homesickness under a guise of indefatigable optimism, barreling forth with an aggressively sunny demeanor, as though I could somehow force Felipe into a state of lighthearted gladness by the sheer power of my magnetic, tireless merrymaking.

  Astonishingly, this did not work.

  Over time, I became irritated with him--exasperated by his impatience, grumpiness, lethargy. Moreover, I became irritated with myself, annoyed by the false notes in my voice as I tried to engage Felipe in whatever curiosity I'd dragged him to this time. (Oh, darling--look! They're selling rats for food! Oh, darling--look! The mommy elephant is washing her baby! Oh, darling--look! This hotel room has such an interesting view of the slaughterhouse!) Meanwhile, Felipe would head off to the bathroom and come back fuming about the filth and stink of the place--whatever place we happened to be in--while simultaneously complaining that the air pollution was making his throat sting and the traffic was giving him a headache.

  His tension made me tense, which caused me to become physically careless, which caused me to stub my toe in Hanoi, to cut my finger on his razor in Chiang Mai as I dug through the toiletries bag for toothpaste, and--one really awful night--to put insect repellent in my eyes instead of eyedrops because I hadn't looked carefully at the travel-sized bottle. What I remember most about that last incident is howling in pain and self-recrimination while Felipe held my head over the sink and rinsed out my eyes with one lukewarm bottl
e of water after another, fixing me up as best he could while raging in a steady, furious tirade about the stupidity of the fact that we were even in this godforsaken country to begin with. It is a testament to how bad those weeks had become that I do not now specifically remember which godforsaken country we were in.

  All this tension reached a peak (or, rather, hit a nadir) the day I hauled Felipe on a twelve-hour bus ride through the center of Laos to visit what I insisted would be a fascinating archaeological site in the middle of the country. We shared the bus with no small amount of livestock, and our seats were harder than Quaker meetinghouse pews. There was no air-conditioning, of course, and the windows were sealed shut. I can't rightly say that the heat was unbearable, because obviously we bore it, but I will say that it was very, very hot. I couldn't rouse Felipe's interest in the upcoming archaeological site, but I also couldn't get a rise out of him about the conditions of our bus ride--and that really was notable, given that this was probably the most perilous public transportation experience I'd ever endured. The driver operated his ancient vehicle with a manic aggression, several times almost dumping us over some fairly impressive cliffs. But Felipe did not react to any of this, nor did he react to any of our near collisions with oncoming traffic. He just went numb. He shut his eyes in weariness and stopped speaking altogether. He seemed resigned to death. Or perhaps he was merely longing for it.

  After several more such life-threatening hours, our bus suddenly rounded a curve and came upon the site of a big road accident: Two buses not at all unlike ours had just crashed head-on. There seemed to be no injuries, but the vehicles were a twisted-up pile of smoking metal. As we slowed to pass, I grabbed Felipe's arm and said, "Look, darling! There's been a collision between two buses!"

  Without even opening his eyes, he replied sarcastically, "How on earth could that possibly have happened?"

  Suddenly I was shot through with anger.

  "What is it that you want?" I demanded.

  He didn't answer, which only made me angrier, so I pushed on: "I'm just trying to make the best out of this situation, okay? If you have any better ideas or any better plans--please, by all means, offer some. And I really hope you can think of something that will make you happy, because I honestly can't take your misery anymore, I really can't."

  Now his eyes flew open. "I just want a coffeepot," he said with unexpected passion.

  "What do you mean, a coffeepot?"

  "I just want to be home, living with you in one place safely together. I want routine. I want a coffeepot of our own. I want to be able to wake up at the same time every morning and make breakfast for us, in our own house, with our own coffeepot."

  In another setting, maybe this confession would have drawn sympathy from me, and perhaps it should have drawn sympathy from me then, but it just made me angrier: Why was he dwelling on the impossible?

  "We can't have any of that stuff right now," I said.

  "My God, Liz--you think I don't know that?"

  "You think I don't want those things, too?" I shot back.

  His voice rose: "You think I'm not aware that you want those things? You think I haven't seen you reading real estate ads online? You think I can't tell you're homesick? Do you have any idea how it makes me feel that I cannot provide you with a home right now, that you're stuck in all these beat-up hotel rooms on the other side of the world because of me? Do you have any idea how humiliating that is for me, that I can't afford to offer you a better life right now? Do you have any idea how fucking helpless that makes me feel? As a man?"

  I forget sometimes.

  I have to say this, because I think it's such an important point when it comes to marriage: I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men--for certain people--to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents.

  I can still remember the anguished look on an old friend's face when he told me, several years ago, that his wife was leaving him. Her complaint, apparently, was that she was overwhelmingly lonely, that he "wasn't there for her"--but he could not begin to understand what this meant. He felt he had been breaking his back to take care of his wife for years. "Okay," he admitted, "so maybe I wasn't there for her emotionally , but by God, I provided for that woman! I worked two jobs for her! Doesn't that show that I loved her? She should have known that I would have done anything to keep providing for her and protecting her! If a nuclear holocaust ever struck, I would've picked her up and thrown her over my shoulder and carried her across the burning landscape to safety--and she knew that about me! How could she say I wasn't there for her?"

  I could not bring myself to break the bad news to my devastated friend that most days, unfortunately, there is no nuclear holocaust. Most days, unfortunately, the only thing his wife had really needed was a little more attention.

  Similarly, the only thing I needed from Felipe at that moment was for him to calm down, to be nicer, to show me and everyone else around us a little more patience, a little more emotional generosity. I didn't need provision or protection from him. I didn't need his manly pride; it wasn't serving for anything here. I just needed him to relax into the situation as it was. Yes, of course, it would have been much nicer to be back home, near my family, living in a real house--but our rootlessness right now didn't bother me nearly as much as his moodiness.

  Trying to defuse the tension, I touched Felipe's leg and said, "I can see that this situation is really frustrating for you."

  I had learned that trick from a book called Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage: America's Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationship, by John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman--two (happily married) researchers from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle who have received a lot of attention lately for their claim that they can predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a couple will still be married in five years merely by studying a fifteen-minute transcript of typical conversation between the husband and the wife. (For this reason, I imagine that John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman make terrifying dinner guests.) Whatever the breadth of their powers may be, the Gottmans do offer some practical strategies for resolving marital disputes, trying to save couples from what they call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Stonewalling, Defensiveness, Criticism, and Contempt. The trick I had just used--repeating back to Felipe his own frustration in order to indicate that I was listening to him and that I cared--is something the Gottmans call "Turning Toward Your Partner." It's supposed to defuse arguments.

  It doesn't always work.

  "You don't know how I feel, Liz!" Felipe snapped. "They arrested me. They handcuffed me and marched me through that entire airport with everyone staring--did you know that? They fingerprinted me. They took away my wallet, they even took the ring you gave me. They took everything. They put me in jail and threw me out of your country. Thirty years of traveling, and I've never had a border closed to me before, and now I can't get into the United States of America--of all bloody places to get kicked out of! In the past I would've just said, 'The hell with it,' and moved on, but I can't--because America is where you want to live, and I want to be with you. So I have no choice. I have to put up with all this shit, and I have to turn my entire private life over to these bureaucrats and to your police, and it's humiliating. And we can't even get any information about when this is all going to be finished, because we don't even matter. We're just numbers on a civil servant's desk. Meanwhile, my business is dying and I'm going broke. So of course I'm miserable. And now you're dragging me all over goddamn Southeast Asia on these goddamn buses--"

  "All I'm trying to do is keep you happy," I snapped back at him, pulling away my hand, stung and hurt. If there had been a cord on that bus to pull to signal the driver that a passenger wanted to get off, I swear to God I would have pulled it. I would have jumped
off right there, left Felipe on that bus, taken my chances in the jungle by myself.

  He inhaled sharply, as though he was going to say something hard but stopped himself. I could almost feel the tendons in his neck tightening, and my frustration escalated, too. Our setting didn't exactly help, by the way. The bus lurched along, loud and hot and chancy, whacking low-hanging branches, scattering pigs and chickens and children in the road before us, throwing up a stinking cloud of black exhaust, slamming every vertebra in my neck with each jolt. And there were still seven hours left to go.

  We said nothing for a long time. I wanted to cry but held myself together, recognizing that crying might be unhelpful. Still, I was angry at him. Sorry for him, yes, of course--but mostly angry at him. And for what? For bad sportsmanship, maybe? For weakness? For caving in before I did? Yes, our situation was lousy, but it could have been infinitely lousier. At least we were together. At least I could afford to stay with him during this period of exile. There were thousands of couples in our exact situation who would have killed for the right to spend even one evening together during such a long period of enforced separation. At least we had that comfort. And at least we had the education to read the monstrously confusing immigration documents, and at least we had enough money to enlist a good lawyer to help us through the rest of the process. Anyhow, even if worse came to worst and the United States rejected Felipe from its shores forever, at least we had other options. My God, we could always move to Australia, for heaven's sake. Australia! A wonderful country! A nation of Canada-like sanity and prosperity! It wasn't as if we were going to be sent to exile in northern Afghanistan! Who else in our situation had so many advantages?