Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give Read online

  But “and yet” works the other way, too. Even during the darkest moments of my own marriage, I have felt these nagging exceptions. And yet we have this child together. And yet we still make each other laugh. And yet I still love him.

  And so you don’t break up, and you outlast some more of your friends’ marriages.

  My own parents have been married since 1974, weathering a how-much-time-do-you-have list of crises. I went to my mother for advice once when Neal and I were fighting. “How do you stay married?” I asked her. Her reply: “You don’t get divorced.”

  At the time, I thought her response flip, but now I consider it wise. Couples who have been married forty and fifty years tell me they’ve been on the verge of leaving many times. And then they just . . . didn’t.

  Gwyneth Paltrow said, not long before her own split from Chris Martin, that her parents revealed the secret of their long marriage as: “We never wanted to get divorced at the same time.”

  “My parents were too poor to get divorced,” my friend Rachel told me. “And so they stayed married and then it seemed too late to get divorced, and now they’re glad.”

  Later that morning, while waiting to hear from Neal about the flights, I decided to kill time looking at nearby houses on a house-hunting app. When I used to travel alone as a teenager, I would stare at houses wherever I was and imagine what it would be like to live there. I still do that, but now I can also look on my phone and see how much they cost.

  Comparing houses in Minneapolis, I found I actually preferred the cheaper, more ramshackle, family-friendly ones, like a two-bedroom that had “classic old world charm.” Hardwood floors! A built-in buffet! So much better, really, than the pricier one-bedroom I would live in as a single person on the other side of Powderhorn Park, with its new ceiling fans, three cedar closets, and breakfast nook.

  What would I even do with three cedar closets?

  Meanwhile, still no word from Neal about the flights.

  One thing I love about marriage (and I love a lot of things about marriage) is that you can have a bad day or even a bad few years, full of doubt and confusion and storming out of the house. But as long as you don’t get divorced, you are no less married than couples who have it all figured out.

  You can be bad at a religion and still be 100 percent that religion. Just because you take the Lord’s name in vain doesn’t make you suddenly a non-Christian. In fact, I think it’s good theology that no matter how hard you try, you are sure to be a sinner, just as you are sure to be lousy, at least sometimes, at being married. There is perfection only in death.

  Years ago at a bridal shower, a bridesmaid turned to the assembled women when the bride-to-be was in the bathroom and said of the engaged couple, “I give them five years.” It was so cruel I gasped. (That the rest of us had been thinking something similar was beside the point.) And yet that couple is still together, even as couples with far better forecasts have imploded. You just never know.

  It is easy for people who have never tried to do anything as strange and difficult as being married to say marriage doesn’t matter, or to condemn those who fail at it, or to mock those who even try. But there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again. Peter renounced Jesus three times before the cock crowed. And yet he was the rock upon whom Christ built his church.

  This, it turns out, is how a marriage lasts: we stay in it long enough to see things change, for good and for ill and for good again. Definitive studies or scurrilous gossip about “happy marriages” or “unhappy marriages” have nothing new to tell us. As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.

  Hero and villain, winner and loser—in a marriage, none of these are permanent roles; the parts are recast with every new play. Within a year of our Minneapolis trip, I would miss a connecting flight through Texas, costing me—us—$327 and my sense of superiority. Neal would respond to news of my error as if his team had just won a play-off game.

  That he and I sometimes want to kill each other doesn’t make ours an unhappy union. That we sometimes let each other down does not make it a failure. There is wisdom in an old Jack Benny joke: “Mary and I have been married forty-seven years, and not once have we ever had an argument serious enough to mention the word ‘divorce’ . . . ‘murder,’ yes, but ‘divorce,’ never.” So, too, in the John Updike line “All blessings are mixed.”

  At weddings, I do not contradict my beaming newlywed friends when they talk about how they will gracefully succeed where nearly everyone in human history has floundered. I only wish I could tell them that in this marriage, occasionally they will suffer—and that not only will they likely endure sitcom-grade squabbles, but possibly even dark-night-of-the-soul despair.

  That doesn’t mean they are condemned to divorce, just that it’s unlikely that they will be each other’s best friend every single minute forever. And that while it’s good to aim high, it’s quite probable they will let each other down many times, in ways both petty and profound, that in this blissful moment they can’t even fathom.

  I would never say any of this out loud, of course. But if I did, I would go on to say (assuming I had not yet been thrown out of the banquet hall): Failure is part of being human, and it is definitely part of being married. It’s part of what being alive means, occasionally screwing up in expensive ways. And that’s part of what marriage means: sometimes hating this other person but staying together because you promised you would. And then, days or weeks later, waking up and loving him again, loving him still.

  Finally, nearly two hours after Neal’s original flight left, I texted him to ask if he was still on hold with the airline.

  “We just got in a cab,” he replied. “Flying Air Wisconsin, baby!”

  “Did you have to pay for the tickets again?” I texted.

  The phone was silent. In that quiet moment, sitting in my Minneapolis hotel room, I found myself daydreaming about the one-bedroom apartment looking out onto Powderhorn Park. After waking up alone, I would brew some coffee, switch on one of my many ceiling fans, grab a robe from my largest cedar closet, and head for my breakfast nook.

  “Nope,” he wrote back.

  And suddenly I was back in the bigger place on the cheaper side of the park. My family was coming to join me. And I was glad.

  TOAST 2

  The Boring Parts

  Each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape this aloneness.

  —Jim Harrison, Dalva, 1988

  AN AUTHOR I KNOW says he doesn’t write novels because he can’t bring himself to generate “the boring parts”—the pages of plot development required to move the story along. I found myself thinking about that recently as I sat, bored, beside an outdoor motel pool teeming with June bugs, watching my son swim for the better part of an afternoon.

  When our son asks to swim, Neal often remembers something urgent he has to attend to, leaving me alone in a sagging plastic lawn chair, periodically rummaging in my purse for things Oliver can retrieve from the bottom of the pool: bobby pins, a ring, a Matchbox car, change. Any attempt to remove him from the water before at least two hours have elapsed is treated as a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

  Marriage, I thought, sitting poolside, can be boring—a bit like periodically tossing pennies into a pool, wishing against all hope that someone would read your mind and bring you a snack from the vending machine. Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition.

  Based on how we met, I believed that with Neal I would never be bored. Anthony, my roommate in Austin—where I was loitering, post-college, and writing about culture for the Austin Chronicle—brought home a flyer for a show in the park. It was the photocopy of a driver’s license with writing around it explaining that the man in the pic
ture would be performing at a gazebo downtown. He was six foot one and thin and wore glasses and looked a bit like my celebrity crush Crispin Glover.

  My roommate and I went to the show. Neal was performing with three of his friends, one friend’s son, and a much older man whom I mistook for someone in the show but would later learn was a local drunk who had wandered onstage. Neal read minutes from an instant-messenger conversation he’d had at work, sang songs, played noise music, told a story using sock puppets, and landed some very funny jokes.

  Anthony and I laughed a lot, and not only because we felt an obligation as the only people in the audience. I experienced something at that show I’ve felt few times in my life: I was shocked. Growing up in 1980s Manhattan, I saw so much debauchery that I considered myself unshockable. But watching Neal, I thought, I’ve never met anyone like this before. This was followed hard upon by another thought: I want to know everything about him.

  I told my editor at the paper that I thought Neal would make a great profile. He was twenty-five and had done forty fully original shows in one year while working a regular job and running with a group of other office workers and at least one small child. He was either a genius or crazy, and either way, he would make an interesting story.

  “Okay,” my editor said, looking at me over his glasses, “just don’t be alone with him.”

  I interviewed Neal for what became a very long article. Within weeks we were living together.

  Neal grew up in a tiny Texas town, playing drums in the high school band and winning a rap contest at the Tyler mall. He grew up going to church three times a week. For a while, cult leader David Koresh lived down the road. A target for law enforcement because of his long hair and general punk appearance, Neal once came close to being shot by police officers when he went to check on his drum kit at a storage unit late at night.

  At eighteen, he had a baby with his high school girlfriend, and they got married. All he ever wanted was to be an artist and a musician, so he found ways to do that even when he was delivering pizzas. A disturbing number of his former classmates are dead or in jail—one was shot by a repo man, others put in prison for robbing the movie theater where they worked. When the survivors have class reunions, they give only a day’s notice because no one but Neal lives more than an hour away.

  We left Austin together and moved to New York, where he has continued to do shows, only now they are at hip theaters in Manhattan. And yet it’s an illusion that the profusion of excitement with which we’ve surrounded ourselves could inoculate us fully against the boredom of dailiness. For while Neal is a lunatic whose shows are controlled mayhem, he also sulks if I forget to take the chicken out of the freezer in time for it to defrost before dinner.

  Our marriage has had hours, days, weeks, and months that I would characterize as boring.

  These boring parts come in many forms. There is the boredom of responsibility: crafting a budget, planning meals, arranging child care, cleaning.

  “What are you doing?” Neal asked once when he caught me on the floor sorting Playmobil pieces from Legos.

  “A dramatization,” I said, “of why there are no Great American Novels by women.”

  There is the boredom of knowing what to expect.

  “Every time,” Neal said, sighing, “every single time you go to fade the radio to the back of the car so only the boy can hear it, you press the same wrong buttons in the same wrong sequence.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but now I do it faster.”

  There is the boredom of other people’s needs, their feelings, their annoying habit of being right.

  “You broke the bathroom faucet, but I know you’ll find some way to blame me for it,” Neal said, correctly.*

  At such times, when it feels that we have each other all sized up, it’s hard not to long for a new mystery to solve. Why keep doing the same jigsaw puzzle, over and over and over again?

  Forsaking all others means going deep with one person—exhaustingly deep. Sometimes, listening to Neal chatter on, trying not to react defensively, failing, I feel crushed by the sameness, like I’ve landed upon a shrill TV show and there’s no way to change channels.

  Other men, I think at such moments, wouldn’t care if I broke a faucet. And if they did, I could find someone else, leapfrogging from one lily pad of tolerance to the next. Or I could be alone, in which case I could break all my faucets and no one would say a thing.

  A few years into our marriage, Neal and I hit a particularly dreary patch of plot development. I was working full-time at a job I’d grown to hate. Neal was touring but making little money. Our toddler was opening and closing drawers. He was so cute, and we loved him so much, and yet so much of his care involved repetition. (Fortunately, with Dora the Explorer on, no one can hear you scream.) Neal thought I should be making more time for him, which I found infuriating because I thought he should be thinking about how he could make more money, not about what movie we should go see.

  So it should not have been a surprise, though it was, when one day, while Oliver was in his weekly split second of preschool and I was getting dressed to go to a meeting, Neal told me he had feelings for another woman. When he said her name, I flinched. I knew her. She was pretty and familiar. I’d never been jealous of her, and now I felt like a fool. I’d thought I’d known his mind and heart through and through; had I known him at all?

  “You what?” I screamed. I cried so hard I could barely breathe. On the way to my meeting, I tried to fix my makeup, but my face was so puffy it was useless. When I got to the office, I lied and said it was allergies. Halfway through the meeting, I excused myself to visit the bathroom, where I cried some more.

  Monogamy is, by definition, sameness. Other people provide a reliable escape from the boring parts of the story. In the song “Reasons I Cheat,” Randy Travis lists indignities: a tough day at work, wounded pride, aging. This woman Neal had developed feelings for, she told him he was great. I probably hadn’t said that to him in a while.

  A couple of years ago, a man from the middle of the country, having read something I’d written in the New York Times, sent me a long e-mail about affairs he’d had in the course of his fifteen-year marriage. A physical affair had done little damage, but an emotional one had proved a torment, estranging him from his wife and hurting the other woman, whom he referred to as “J.”

  “What did I want from J?” he asked.

  I wasn’t available for marriage. Not to be her boyfriend. But to be something. I thought, how nice. We can do this. We can recognize we can never be together. But maybe we can carve out a space for this in our lives. We can go on secret dinners. We can maybe hold each other in the parking lot. Maybe kiss. Share sweet emails. Enjoy our emotional connection. And then go back to our lives. But of course this seems silly to write. How can you stay only a little bit in love?

  When Neal told me about the other woman, I threw him out, telling him to sort out his feelings somewhere else. He went to stay with his best bachelor friend, and he also went, curiously, to talk to my father. “You could leave,” my father told him, “but you wouldn’t fix anything. Wherever you go, there you are. You would just have different problems. Are the problems you have now so bad that any other problems would be better?”

  Sex advice columnist Dan Savage says that everyone talks in their wedding vows about how they would “walk through fire” or “take a bullet” for each other without realizing that more often than not, the bullet and the fire is your spouse saying to you, “I have feelings for another person” or “I slept with someone else.” Many of us who have been through this would prefer a literal bullet to the metaphorical one. (Dan Savage and his husband, taking the approach that the best defense is a good offense, have rejected the ideal of perfect monogamy and consider themselves “monogamish.”)

  “I still love you,” Neal said after telling me about that other woman. “I love our life together. I don’t want to leave you. I just don’t know what to do with these feelings for her.”


  “Kill them with fire,” I suggested.

  In 2012, the second ex-wife of conservative presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said that he’d asked her for an open marriage after revealing an affair. When he was questioned about this in a debate, he responded as though auditioning for the Broadway company of a play called How Dare You, Sir? He condemned the open marriage rumor, though he did not deny having had a six-year-long clandestine affair—evidently less of an embarrassment.

  At a library sale, I discovered a long out-of-print marriage advice book originally published in 1938, and it had one of the most reasonable passages I’ve ever read about infidelity:

  I am stating that emotional entanglements of greater or less severity (not necessarily culminating in technical infidelity) are very apt to occur in the best-regulated of marriages, and that there is no ideal way of handling them. Monogamy and freedom, concealment and frankness, all lead to unhappy consequences. The discussion is gloomy, however, only if you demand of marriage a vapid perfection. Gliding slowly along smooth unfrequented city avenues in a closed limousine saves you the bumps and dangers of the open highway, but it’s not much fun. If we want the flavor and richness of a real marriage in a real world, we have to accept jolts and risks as part of our experience. There is no escape from the complicated joys and sorrows of marriage. We must accept the jangling, painful aspects of a relationship along with the harmonious intimacy. A good marriage is none the worse for periods of jealousy and resentment and struggle. The grave danger of most extramarital relationships, platonic or not, is that we take them too seriously. The motorist is so disturbed by occasional rough roads that he renounces his whole journey, so appalled by a bashed-in fender that he refuses to drive a car again.