You Stay, I Stay: A Marriage Story
The question: With so much evidence against the happily-ever-after, why insist on it?
My husband and I disagree about the children — when to say yes, when to say no, prerequisites for dessert, how many bags are allowed on vacation, doors open, doors closed, sundry other rules of human citizenship and how many times to gently teach these rules before an expression of disappointment ensues. Interestingly, this isn’t something you can know about each other before you have children (e.g., how many bites of the veggie will you make them eat?). There was no preparing for this. And so, it is our fight.
When it comes up, we sometimes get stuck there — disagreeing, unable to convince each other, and not really needing to because the thing we’re arguing about is already done. (Door shut, green beans eaten, two bags compacted into one.)
One night after the same, we’d presented our differing viewpoints, and a silent truce prevailed. I felt the silence like a great divide, growing wider, and I knew if we let it be, it would grow. Eventually we’d speak to each other again, but coldly, distantly. We’d touch less. We wouldn’t smile or laugh at each other’s jokes or look one another in the eye. We’d be roommates and co-parents, two individuals hanging in there because parenting seemed only messier with an ex.
I thought to myself how humbling it would be to cross the divide, that the first person to try would be the chump, that speaking first into the silence was not that different from letting the other person win. To speak was an apology, and only the wrong one would do that. Was I willing to be the chump? I took the plunge. I said a simple thing in a gentle voice, and I looked at him instead of away. He took the step after that, the gap closed, and we changed the story. We’d disagree again, but each time we tried a little harder to understand each other — not just to allow our differences but to trust and value them.
It’s a little story, about a big decision to stay.
When I told my husband I was thinking of writing an article about marriage, and how to know when to stay, he was understandably concerned. My husband doesn’t ask himself whether or not to stay when it comes to marriage. Why was I? I tried to tell him it wasn’t about our marriage. It was about marriage in general (which I think he would agree is not always a total piece of cake) and my childish wish to find the reasons to work at it beyond because you have to. The thing is, I said, the statistics are starting to get to me.
A million reasons to leave…
Women my age are leaving their marriages in droves, or so it seems. An article by Ada Calhoun (linked later) points to a study saying 69% of divorces are initiated by women.
It’s not surprising to me since I feel I know so many of them. When it happened to someone close to me — when he hadn’t been abusive or cheated or left her when he might have had a reason, and then she left — I began a journey of wondering what I believed about staying. If there are any reasons at all when I think it makes sense to leave, then what reasons aren’t enough? If my husband wants to live on the beach, and I want a townhouse in the city, is that enough? If I want to try the starving artist life, but he is saving for a boat, is that a reason?
It happens. That much seems clear.
{Fair notice: celebrities are such visible examples for what we as a society do and do not believe about marriage, I refer to them a lot here. It paints a broader picture than you’d think, so let’s go with it.}
In an interview with Oprah, Brad Pitt (while married to Jennifer Aniston) said he believed a marriage should last as long as both people are growing. It sounded pretty enlightened, really. I never want to stop learning and growing. This was also the moment I felt Brad and Jen were doomed. I feel if you give yourself an out that easy, you’ll probably take it. It seems good to wonder if you’re still growing but super easy to blame it on the relationship when you’re not. Because of this, I realized I believe in staying a little more than Brad.
Enter: my personality. In no other area of my life have I reenacted the belief that to stay is the best or only choice. I’ve left jobs and houses, abandoned memberships, changed colorists, and regularly employ the unsubscribe button for email lists I intentionally joined. Author, lawyer, and occasional diplomat, Bob Goff, has said we should quit things on Thursdays, and I love this advice. I know the freedom of it, and I’m a fan.
Certainly I’ve noticed many times the stayers get more glory. Those who stick it out are the faithful, the warriors, the better ones.
Hope if everybody runs, you choose to stay — One Republic.
There is a certain FOMO attached to leaving because of the praise only the stayers receive. And yet, we’ve all watched the politician’s wives, standing by their man — literally standing there — while he publicly apologizes for numerous betrayals that to her are deeply personal and for which you suspect he wouldn’t be apologizing at all had he not been publicly caught. People even closer to me than this have stayed after similar betrayals. Some put up with verbal abuse, too, or they are loyal to a spouse who’s regularly in rehab or to one who needs it but won’t go. As it happens, I believe in staying a little less than these.
It’s right to do right. Right?
When I was young, the answer to long marriage lived well within the boundaries of my faith. You stay because you’re supposed to.
This seemed like enough until people who shared my faith started bailing like cockroaches — or, rather, until I started to notice it. Sometimes they left because their partner cheated. Few people consider this kind of leaving unjustified. Reasons like, “I need to find myself,” get less support, and it became apparent the no-divorce rule has exceptions.
I could say their faith was different than mine — the people who divorced with reasons less than what I thought our faith allowed — but it wouldn’t be true. Faith doesn’t ensure much of anything, really, especially agreement between two parties. We’re too different, and faith is too big. Religion ensures even less. It has more definition, more rules, but this seems to be enough only to judge divorce and not enough to stop it.
If it makes you happy…
Maybe it really is a fairy tale — the chance that marriage will last. Some people like each other forever; some don’t.
Michelle Pfeiffer, a Hollywood unicorn for being in such a lengthy marriage, has been asked about the concept a lot (Google it, you’ll see). In an article I read so long ago it was in print instead of online, her reason for a happy marriage with David E. Kelly was this: We still like each other, she said. We’re lucky in love.
It was a slogan that felt like mine.
My husband and I met about the same time Melanie Smooter and Jake Perry kissed on a beach in Sweet Home Alabama. (We were ten.) “Nobody finds their soulmate when they’re ten,” Jake says, but my diaries prove him wrong just as the movie did. From Day One of fifth grade, my husband and I circled each other like the positive and negative of coordinating magnets. My parents weren’t so much for children dating, so I rebuffed his proposals for several years — at least in practice. Will you go with me? I can’t. Is it your mom or your dad? It’s both. Will you go with me now? I was obedient, if not to the core, turning him down but writing “I heart MB” on more than one paper in math class, and I could hardly help the way I looked at him when he spoke.
All that non-dating left us nowhere to go but friendship — at least, that’s how I tell it — and he became my favorite friend in the world. When we finally had our first date one Valentine’s Day, I was done. My wild, lingering crush had turned to friendship, and I would have married him that night if we’d had a ring. We were 19. To this day, I can remember exactly what it felt like to love a boy I couldn’t have. I can remember when his last name was the thing I wanted most in the world. And I remember what it felt like for days and years after the wedding when he out-shined the dream because he was good and kind and nonstop funny, and he loved me. This is what Michelle Pfeiffer meant, I thought. This is luck, and we’re lucky to have it.
But “nobody tells you how long a marriage is,” a recent article states, and that feels true, too. Once you’ve been married more years than you haven’t, you’ve been through so much together it can feel like all there is; adventure over. It’s thought-provoking for a restless type like me who doesn’t even buy the same toothpaste one shopping trip to the next. Like most of us, I saw a number of people around me unhappy or leaving. It began to look like marriage can’t possibly thrive long-term. Why would it? In what other part of life do we value stubbornness and the pursuit of staying-the-same? In direct contrast to Pfeiffer’s luck philosophy, Jennifer Aniston has stated relative to her many relationships that she feels she’s been incredibly lucky in love. Suddenly one wonders: if a happy, long-term relationship is so nice, perhaps we should do it more than once in a lifetime. It seems to work just as well, and maybe better. It certainly works for most of the people in high school.
All tolled, I feel like I understand the women who leave. We get married young. We don’t have enough money sometimes. Cleaning the kitchen more than once a day is a total pain. And those old dreams we used to have outside of our getting-married dream (let’s not forget that one, though) begin to look far more romantic than they are and (obviously) held back only by the marriage. As Calhoun states clearly: middle-aged women are struggling, and there is very little evidence this will change.
It’s a million reasons to leave, this midlife crisis, a reality in which what worked for our 20s now feels stale.
A common feeling in the crisis is that one gets lost in a long relationship, especially one that began when we were young. If we didn’t truly know ourselves then — and who does really? — how can we ever find ourselves within a marriage? Maybe we can’t. It’s worth considering, though, what the younger us would say about it. It’s doubtful we felt lost when we took the leap.
When we leave because we’re lost, marriage may be the victim more than the cause. Perhaps we blame it for a reality that’s inside us because our relationship is the breakable thing we can escape.
And still we believe…
Lately I’ve wondered if it’s not the statistics that should change, but the vows. Maybe we should stop promising forever if there are so many reasons we may not follow through. The confusing thing is this: With so much evidence against our track record with vows, millions of us still get up in the wee sma’s for another royal wedding. Stranger yet, the ratings for reality TV suggest we are willing to believe people can find happily-ever-after in six weeks or less. I mean, we don’t really believe it, but…Trista and Ryan! So, maybe, right? If we’re so terrible at this, if people can survive divorce and move on, why do we still buy into the possibility that sometimes it lasts forever and happily? Why do we care? What is it about this that appeals? And if it appeals at all, does it appeal enough to dig in our heels and make it happen?
A case for staying
Earlier I wondered, “In what other part of life do we value…staying-the-same?” Perhaps there isn’t a lot of argument for staying when it comes to our careers, our education, or our understanding of the world, but the study of happiness would suggest — and has suggested for centuries — there is a very strong case for it at least when it comes to relationships.
“Gretchen Rubin says strong relationships are the key to happiness,” the article states, and Rubin has built a career around the study of happiness, human nature, and habits. One could argue a relationship doesn’t have to last forever to be “strong”, but a phrase later in the transcript describes the key to happiness this way: Enduring intimate relationships. (Italics mine). It’s not that hard to accept, is it? I think perhaps we ask it of each other all the time, at least internally: How long will you love me? Even if this? Will you love me even then? Even then, I sometimes think, is the greatest gift any human can give another — to love another person because you love them, not because of who they are or what they have or how often they think exactly like you. It’s a powerful thing in friendship and in marriage.
I wrote about staying on my blog once. I quoted Elizabeth Gilbert in her book on marriage, Committed — a thorough, if qualitative, history of the institution. Gilbert suggests staying in a marriage is to faith or spirituality what being thrown in the water is to swimming lessons. We can theorize all we want about transcendence, but her imagery suggests that sitting at the kitchen table every morning and forgiving the person across from us for everything different or difficult about them is perhaps the truest way to live it.
A visitor to the post that day left a comment quoting Jamie Lee Curtis. When a reporter asked her the secret to long marriage, Curtis said simply, “Stay.” When pressed, because it hardly seemed an answer, she expounded: “Don’t leave. Stay.”
It didn’t seem enough to me, either. Just stay? But…evolving interests, recurring fights, irreconcilable differences…how do you get through any of it if your only argument is the second command they teach you in dog obedience school?
After that, it wouldn’t let me go. I opened myself to the simplicity of it and wondered if it could be enough, if it could even be beautiful.
I asked a nonbeliever once — not a marriage nonbeliever but a religious one— if my faith made me stay, what made him? My friend said this: I stay because my life is telling a story, and I want it to be good.
This spoke to me beyond what religion can do because story is my language, and I want a good one, too.
As it happens, the article about how long a marriage is, agrees — despite, or perhaps because of, how much the story can change us.
The article suggests something else familiar, too. If one person is determined to stay, it’s a promising beginning and might just be enough.
You stay, I stay…
A couple close to us came to our house one night and said one of them had been having an affair but they’d decided to stay together. They’d not really even considered the alternative, though years later the marriage would crumble anyway. It’s difficult to recover from that. The one who strayed never felt forgiven. The one betrayed felt unwanted. When the couple left, my husband and I cleaned the kitchen together. He stood beside me at the counter and said, “I will never do that to you.” I shook my head and laughed or cried or something in between and said, “I’d like to say the same, but I’m shaken. It seems it can happen to anyone.” And he made me turn to him, and he took my face in his hands, and he said, “I will never do that to you.”
Sometimes when we’re apart, I want to text him, “I love you”, but first I wonder — what if he’s changed his mind? What if he’s failing me right now, and I send this and I become the chump? Then, I remember what he said in our kitchen, and I realize that until proven otherwise, that’s the deal. Our promises are the rock on which we stand — each person, giving it all, risking everything on the substance of what we hope.
When it comes to staying, I’ve wondered which comes first: Wanting to stay or deciding to. Maybe each one leads to the other. You want one another, so you stay. You decide to stay, so you touch and smile and laugh at jokes you’ve heard a hundred times, and then you want to stay because he’s laughing, too.
When I started this search, I wanted to find a reason for all of us — a reason to believe in the institution itself. What I found instead is the reason I believe in us.
Maybe we’re lucky.
Maybe we’re lucky if we want to be.
