Marriage Can Be Hard..But...

I’m always thinking about relationships and marriage. It’s one of my favorite reading topics, because, of course, I love learning about what makes people tick, and intimate relationships are the perfect crucible. I find that sometimes the best learning comes from reading about relationships that don’t work, …until they do.

I know it’s a book that divides the field, but I loved Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, “Eat. Pray.

Love”

 I’ve read it and listened to it. I especially love what she has to say about God and pleasure and faith and how she learned to overcome her fear.

Yes, it did help that she had a big house to sell and a huge book advance. But, for me, none of that discounts her humor and the good grace of her book. 

I especially loved when she asked –by name-- everyone in the universe co-sign her prayer to have her divorce end peaceably. And I also loved the water tower scene in India, when finally turning that ex over to God—and seeing their higher selves meeting and releasing. 

But the book that followed “Eat, Pray, Love” was Gilbert’s second memoir, and the continuation of the story.  “Committed” is about marriage and how Gilbert reluctantly married the man she fell in love with at the end of “Eat, Pray, Love.”

One of my favorite lines from Committed is this: “There is good reason to end such stories with weddings, and buoyant celebrations of love. Because what follows a wedding is a marriage. And marriage is an institution, not a party.”

That’s a great line, and quite borrowable for toasts, I think.

What Gilbert also says is this: “Marriage is hard when you invest all of your expectations for happiness in one other person. A man can be part of a good life, but not the life.”

Now that’s a great poster or a mantra for young women.

So how do you get to a great marriage from the reality of “Marriage is hard”? The recipe is this: Invest in all parts of your life and in many relationships. You have to make (intentionally create) your own good and full life, and then a partner can become a great accessory.

Indeed.

*****

I write a lot about relationships and marriage in my book, “Out of the Woods”—available at bookstores and, of course, on Amazon.

More on Marriage

I’m still thinking about marriage, and loving what I learn from reading. Sometimes the best learning comes from reading about relationships that don’t work, until they do.

I loved Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, “Eat. Pray. Love” I read it and I listened to it: God and pleasure and faith and fear and how she learned to overcome fear.

Yes, OK, it did help that she had a big house to sell and a huge book advance. But none of that discounts her humor and good grace of her book. I especially loved when she asked –by name-- everyone in the universe co-sign her prayer to have her divorce end peaceably. And I also loved that water tower scene in India, finally, finally turning that ex over to God—

But her book that followed “Eat, Pray, Love” is Gilbert’s second memoir, and the rest of the story,  “Committed” about marriage and how she reluctantly married the man she fell in love with at the end of “Eat, Pray, Love.” One of my favorite lines from Committed is this:

“There is good reason to end such stories with weddings, and buoyant celebrations of love. Because what follows a wedding is a marriage. And marriage is an institution, not a party.”

A great line. Quite borrowable for toasts, I think.

What Gilbert also says is, “Marriage is hard when you invest all of your expectations for happiness in one other person. A man can be part of a good life, but not the life.”

Now that’s a tattoo or a poster or a mantra for young women and all women.

So how do you get that great marriage from the reality of “Marriage is hard”? By investing in all parts of your life and in many relationships. You have to make (intentionally create) your own good and full life, and then a man/partner can be a great accessory.

Indeed.

*****

I write lots about relationships and marriage in my book, “Out of the Woods”—available at bookstores and, of course, on Amazon.http://www.amazon.com/Out-Woods-Womans-Long-Term-Recovery/dp/1937612473

Tis the Season

Wedding season that is.

For the longest time our wedding was the last one we went to and then suddenly a big shift. We have been to three weddings since January and there are three more before July. Most are first time marriages and some are for the second time. But even the first timer's have to manage step-families and double and triple sets of parents and grandparents. That means that a lot of people have to "wear beige and shut up."

We have seen some extraordinary examples of well-blended families. One wedding--a second time--included the former spouses of the bride and groom and their spouses and everybody's kids. And everyone was genuinely happy. How does that happen? A lot of therapy? A lot of medication? And/or a lot of prayer and grace I think.

We are on our way to another wedding today. We hope this rain blesses them. No matter the weather I feel cheered by their belief in marriage and their willingness to celebrate with family and friends. And the bonus is that John and I  get to dance together again.

A Movie for Caregivers

A beautiful new movie is on its way to us from Paris. Opening this week in New York City Michael Haneke's "Amour" is described as a masterpiece about love and aging and, yes, caring for someone who is ill. I have been following this film since is Paris debut and now it is near. This is a movie for all of us because it is about aging--and few of us will skip that..and it is about caring for someone we love--few of us will skip that.

Here at the link below is the New York Times review:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/movies/michael-hanekes-amour-with-jean-louis-trintignant.html?

And Then the Hair Grows in...

One thing I have never understood is how to work it so that when you’re married things keep happening to you. Things happen to you when you are single. You meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married and the hair grows in.

Nora Ephron, from her wonderful novel, “Heartburn”.

Leonard Cohen on Marriage

I’m reading the book, “I’m Your Man”—it’s the new biography of poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen. I’ve loved his writing forever, and his music of course, and I am coming to love his contradictions: a ladies man who is a monk, a fabulous performer who hates to perform and a homely man who is supremely attractive.

He said this about marriage:

Marriage is the hardest spiritual practice in the world. Anybody can sit on Mount Baldy for hours on end, weeks, months. But it’s nothing compared to marriage. If you’re really there, really present, for marriage it’s self-reflection 24/7. Who can take that?

The Bitch in the Test

Yesterday morning I left the house cursing like a cartoon character. The string of profanity coming out of my mouth was G%R&A&*^%$#!!@$!!!--and kind of like James Joyce was writing bad words—the nastiest things all strung together with no punctuation…

At work I was better outwardly but inwardly I was a mess of cranky, scared, sad and, well, just disconnected. Luckily it was Friday and luckily I had a lot of basic tasks to do. Head down and uncomfortable I worked the day away.

But still. Yuck.

John’s son came for dinner so I thought maybe it was the stepfamily stuff. It’s always hovering there in the polite way we talk and how carefully we choose our topics when together. We don’t use these words: wedding, marriage, divorce, Mom, sex or affair, and I’m the only one who will say the word cancer out loud.

And I did. That was it. After dinner John and I talked about plans for the weekend and he reminded me that Sunday plans were out because he’d be doing “The Prep” and it hit me:

His big test. The in-hospital colonoscopy, performed by our favorite surgeon is Monday morning at 7am. Oh. Dam. Oh Dam. All that cranky, out-of-sorts misery is about cancer and chemo and The Test racing toward us.

But we are a different couple three years later. And I am a different woman. I said, “Sit and talk to me.” So we bundled on the bed and talked. I said, “What if..” and he said, “It will go like this…”. And I said, “I’m going to be hard on you this time….” And he said, “I’ll listen this time…” and we laughed. And laughed. We played the “If Cancer Comes Back” Game. We talked about our voodoo beliefs and the deals with God we’ve each been making. I was happy to hear the words “beach” and “diamonds”.

Looking forward to making love tonight because Sunday is not an option. The Prep is a mess in every way with its pills and solutions and salves and timers. But the real prep began last night laughing about what used to be and what could come and how we’ll do it together.

Bonnie Prudden

In my early 20’s I was a dance student and worked part-time teaching dance to kids and adults to pay my way. I worked a lot at the YWCA in Pittsburgh and when I had time I took the other classes they offered. Several of the fitness teachers were crazy about a woman named Bonnie Prudden who had a new style of exercise. We all practiced it and we exercised to her records. Yes—we exercised to records—33rpm—and listed to the instructions and looked at photos on the album cover. Seems crazy now that we have videos, cd’s and YouTube exercise teachers.

But Bonnie was something else. Her exercise was aerobic and dancelike and strength building and she was funny! She talked about women’s real bodies and real lives as she taught.

The YWCA teachers—all older --invited me along on a trip to Connecticut to spend a week with Miss Prudden. We trained with her and were exposed to a new course she was developing called “Sexercise” so radical and amazing. Again, she talked about real life, real women’s bodies and real women’s sex life—and the impact on marriage. My eyes were big!

On the way home with women who were “older” 40’s and 50’s I heard those women talk about their marriages and sex lives. Again eye opening. I’m sure that those “gym teachers” and Bonnie Prudden reinforced my belief in sex and sexy marriages as healthy, fun and essential to happiness.

Bonnie Prudden died on December 11^th at age 97. Her New York Times obituary says she was still exercising every day.

Fighting for Us

This weekend we battled. All the ingredients were there: hungry, tired, bad traffic, a long car ride, a difficult family member, my expectations, his assumptions.

Later, after the swearing was over, we talked about what happened. I need to speak up. He needs to ask questions. We need to plan for the emotions that are provoked by family. I need to take it less personally. He needs to take it more seriously. We both apologized.

But still later, after the make-up sex was over, we talked again and came to this new idea: When we fight we need to fight for the relationship and not against each other. Yes, easier said than done in the heat of the moment, but a new idea, that makes us allies --even in war.

Love in the Time of Cancer

Here is a true story of Love in the Time of Cancer. This is from today's New York Times from Tara Parker-Pope who writes the "Well" column in the Times' Health section. This inspires humility. Not just two cancers but a baby too. Click below and read on:


http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/a-couples-knot-tied-tighter-by-dual-diagnoses/

Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall

Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall: Poets, lovers, husband and wife. Both had cancer . Donald, much older, lived. Jane, much younger, died. But, both being poets, they had the habit of turning all life experiences into poems. So we have poetry collections from each of them describing each turn and phase of their roles as caregivers and as patients. It’s fascinating to read them together and to trace the intrusion and trajectory of cancer through their loving—and sexy—marriage.

Here is a poem by Jane Kenyon when she is ill and Donald is her caregiver:

I saw him leaving the hospital
with a woman's coat over his arm.
Clearly she would not need it.
The sunglasses he wore could not
conceal his wet face, his bafflement.

As if in mockery the day was fair,
and the air mild for December. All the same
he had zipped his own coat and tied
the hood under his chin, preparing
for irremediable cold.


Coats, by Jane Kenyon

Collaboration and Creativity in Marriage

One of those times of intense inspiration. I’m reading the book, “The Cello Suites” by Eric Siblin—who tells a personal story of searching for the suites and their history—the political and musical history of Bach’s cello suites. I also dug out an old DVD of Yo-Yo Ma and Mark Morrison collaborating on the third suite and listening to them I was moved again by the critical factor of ego and no ego. (This is a beautiful film of Ma and Morrison working at one of my favorite and most sacred places: Jacob’s Pillow)

Clearly Yo-Yo Ma had to find an artist of his caliber with whom to create these collaborations. Watching him with Morrison I could see that it had to be between to artists who had the same amount of skill, expertise, gift and ego to make the collaboration work. If one had more or less then they would have buried the other or dominated the creative work.

Maybe this is also true in marriage? Each partner has to have confidence in themselves, a belief in their own creativity, health, passion, ability, intelligence and the ego strength to both hold their ground and cede the ground as needed. Collaboration may be a better word than partnership. Partnership suggests each puts something aside—dies down a little—in order to make the concern work—but collaboration requires strength and humility—the ability to suggest, insist and to step aside and be taught without loss of face or ego.

Married Life

People keep asking me if it feels different to be married. Yes and No. No because we still live in the same apartment, the grocery list is more or less the same, I still use my favorite Sharpies to mark the newspapers before he reads them, I buy two half gallons of milk at the same time and he still shakes his head (but we never run out—or low).

But different too because something—some teeny anxiety --has settled down inside of me. Different also because I think about his family now as my own as well—and gratefully they have reciprocated so I have these wonderful in-laws and extended family. There is a little bit more “we” in my vocabulary though knowing my old tendencies I’m careful to not lose the “I” as I know that is the surest way for me to lose the “we” and the happiness I’ve found.

Excerpts from Yglesias's A Happy Marriage

“He was vigilant. He no longer feared that one of her infections would kill her, as he had in the early days when cure was a real possibility. The end was inevitable and very near. She had to die of something because cancer does not kill alone. It kills with accomplices, so why not a sepsis?”

“He talked in narrative spurts sorely in need of punctuation and editing, without proper endings or middles. It was a symptom of fatigue and an adaptive response to the way most people reacted to his wife’s frightening illness: they interrogated Enrique intrusively about the logistics of Margaret’s battle while carefully avoiding discussion of its denouement…When he raised the subject of victory or defeat for Margaret, and friend were quick to end the conversation, he would intone to himself in a whisper: “I am become Death, the destroyer of chitchat.”

“In truth, he could find no comfortable place to sit in the company of her illness. He would feel guilt and shame no matter how he behaved. She was going to die and he was not; in the undeclared war of marriage, it was an appalling victory.”

Happier than Fiction

I’m a writer and a reader, yes. But sometimes so amazed, delighted and wondrous at finding a story in fiction that is so perfect for my life.

The day before we left for our honeymoon, I grabbed a new paperback from the shelf at my local bookstore. The title attracted me: “A Happy Marriage”. The perfect thing for a honeymoon, yes?

Yes. “A Happy Marriage” by Rafael Yglesias. His 5th novel. He also wrote “Fearless” which is one of my favorite movies. But this happy marriage is a stunning tale. It is to some degree the story of Yglesias’ own marriage. The courtship, love affair, struggle and finally devastation—all still in love—as Yglesias cared for his wife who was dying of cancer.

Coincidence? Act of God? Just literature doing what it does? Literature giving a wedding gift?

Literature on its own and the literature of caregiving. Intensity of language and of medicine. Man and woman. Husband and wife. Sickness and health. Until death or “The end.”

Le Marriage

We are married. A small wedding. Our families and the close friends who have been our support for several years. Laughter, tears, cancer as a wedding guest—everyone recognized cancer as one of the attendants. We wrote vows that included being faithful—yes, I know—and that included “in sickness and in health”—knowing what that really means. We had great food, a lot of poetry, books, statues of Mary, our dear stuffed Babar and blue ribbons everywhere.

Then we flew to Paris and walked and ate and walked and ate and made love with windows wide open in the City of Lights.

Married

Yesterday, August 15th, John and I were married. A small ceremony in a school house. Family and friends with us. Beautiful flowers. Lots of laughter. Great cake. And this poem:

“Afternoon, in a Back Yard on Chestnut Street,” by David Keller


Here are a man and a woman, being married.

The entire world of summer lawns

holds its breath for the event. The trees

around them are lovely, displaying the small

breath and motions of August. The couple glance

at one another. Where has the moon gone,

the requisite moon? Nearby, a mother

begs her child, “Try to remember;

when did you have it last?” Oh,

impossible mystery. Where is joy

when it is not here? Time says nothing.

These things can happen, and will,

while children at the yard’s border play

among grown-ups tasting the summer’s wine.

Memory looks at its watch, smiling.

The moon will begin to come round

the way it always did but we’d forgotten.

The lovers touch hands and think of

some place they want to be, and go there.

The child, happy at last,

has remembered where its lost ball is.

In the garden the pink phlox and the lilies

show off, between the old moon

here in the hot sky and the one to come.

Everyone hugs or shakes hands

and walks off toward the future, waving.

The man and woman look at each other.

They know it means happiness, this year. They do.

The Marriage Artist

I was talking to my friend Stephanie yesterday about John and our plans to get married in August. “Why get married?” she asked me. The question, asked by others too, has nagged at me. Why get married when we have both been married before; when we won’t have kids; when we don’t know what might happen to his health or to our lives?

Perhaps the implied question: Why are you getting married again? Both of us married before –four past marriages between us--so why again? We talked about the cultural issues, the social status, the fact that marriage carries an additional satisfaction knowing that there are some who have bet against our relationship.

But there is something else: I like being married. As I’ve described it to friends, I like the container of marriage. I have always envisioned marriage as a container in which two people concoct something chemical, physical, emotional and spiritual. Some of the creations live a long time and some don’t. Some have stunningly beautiful chemical reactions, some make stinky messes, but all are living things.

Yesterday talking to Stephanie—as we pushed and pulled at this idea --I realized another part of this. Marriage is a creative act—and yes, in a way that living together is not—the materials are more expensive, there is an audience and there is no net. The very legality adds a risk factor. Seeing marriage as a work of art and myself as a marriage artist came closest to making sense of why I am willing to do this hard, imperfect and often uncomfortable thing over and over. Perhaps it is a kind of performance art created in front of a live audience. Or an installation –bizarrely conceptual and wildly improvisational.

It is also why the question, “Are you happy?” seems irrelevant to me. Friends-- wondering about this marriage –have asked me, “Are you happy?” But that’s not the question that I ask myself. I’m not always happy. What artist is? But am I interested? engaged? challenged? stretched? learning? surprised? perplexed and ultimately deeply changed? Yes to all of the above.

All of these years trying to find my medium, here it is at my finger tips. Marriage as medium. The marriage artist.

Married Illness

Here is a new and wonderful book about making a good—or decent marriage—while facing chronic illness. Called: “A Husband, A Wife & an Illness: Life Beyond Chronic Illness” written by Dr. William July and his wife, Jamey Lacy July.

They had just begun their marriage—his first and her second when a terrible auto-immune illness began to torture her. A former personal trainer and super athlete she was reduced to chronic pain, a life of medical appointments and treatments and a changed body and appearance. The blows were to her and to them. They went bankrupt, lost their dream home (her big income was gone overnight) and their lives were changed in every way. But, they write, they found a way to make a marriage in this long painful illness. It helped that Dr. July was and is a marriage and relationship counselor. But even knowing doesn’t always mean doing.

Powerful lessons from his mistakes and their almost mistakes: the well-spouse has to keep living; has to have a life apart; has to have a self. Not easy to do is it caregivers?

For many of us cancer too is a now a chronic illness. Our minds if not our lives are focused on what’s next, fear, and planning.

Here is a book that is simple, practical and very forthright about how a marriage can survive and sort of thrive in the face of all that.

For more practical wisdom go to theri website: http://www.couplesfacingillness.com/

All of It

A friend of mine told me what a wise friend of hers told her when she was contemplating marriage to the man she had been living with.

The friend told her to get very quiet and “make a list of all the things that upset you, annoy you and that you don’t like about him”. Then very carefully look at that list and ask yourself: “Can you accept each item on that list?”

If you can, then you can marry him because those things will not change.