First of all, I have a zit. A real, bona-fide, pubescent-style zit. Right in the middle of my cheek. That’s not fair. I can’t be middle-aged and have a zit. Where is the justice in that?

So, my online goofing off has given me further fodder for contemplating marriage. Here’s an article about a new book called "The Marriage Benefit: The Surprising Rewards of Staying Together" by Mark O’Connell, a marriage therapist and clinical instructor at the Harvard Medical School.

O’Connell doesn’t argue that all marriages are worth saving, but his focus is on the benefits of long-term intimacy. I like this excerpt:

He explained that scientists have discovered that the first 18 months of any romance effectively are ruled by body chemicals such as dopamine and oxytocin. "We think everything that follows is a compromise."

Lordy, ain’t that the truth.

And:

What O'Connell and marriage therapists hear a lot is that one or both spouses in a marriage feel bored or that they know everything about the other.

"The underlying assumption is we know each other so well," said O'Connell. "That's baloney. We are endlessly complex and always changing. Once romance wears off, we tend to block the complicated places within ourselves, those places where we are most scared. In that way, boredom is sort of dynamic self-protection."

In other words, as I understand it, sometimes it's fear of knowing ourselves and facing our own shortcomings and bogeyman that cause us to turn on our spouses.

More interesting than the article is this radio interview with O’Connell. I find the show host annoying but it’s worth a listen.

One fascinating point O’Connell makes is that marriage (and by that he means long-term monogamous relationships—the callers kvetching about marriage as a legal arrangement are missing the point) make us less narcissistic. In a way, I think, even more so than children which may require people to step outside their own needs but which are an extension of ourselves. (And by “our’ I mean “your.”) Marriage requires us to voluntarily support the well-being of another person without the biological imperative of parenthood.

He also speaks about the terror we all fear when we really do love someone, when we reach the point where we would be devastated if we lost that person, which we inevitably will, one way or another. As I understand it, he believes fear of vulnerability may be behind some resistance to marriage. When we love that deeply, we may someday hurt more. And that's scary shit.

Labels: marriage, personal growth, psychology

I rarely agree with conservative groups agitating over our degrading morals, but this bunch bitching about how marital sex doesn’t get nearly the bump adultery does on TV strikes a chord. Because it’s not just the sex that’s portrayed as dismal—it’s marriage itself.

To quote myself:

…long-term relationships are most often portrayed as stultifying, tainted by seething resentments and unspoken disappointments.

Granted, there is some truth to the challenges of keeping marriage fresh, but long-term does have rewards. They're rarely explicitly portrayed in pop culture, though. Instead, we get Frank and Marie Barone, lobbing insults at each other. Or, more currently, Don and Betty Draper, going through the motions while Don gets his kicks in the big city and Betty gets hers on a horse.

Where are my role models, please?

***

This USA Today story addresses what women already know—the dressing room is a terrible, terrible place. I was kind of relieved to read that I’m not the only woman who has ever cried in a dressing room. It happened at The Gap, where I discovered that I am grossly deformed according to the standards of their designers.

How ‘bout bathing suit shopping? Most bathing suit makers seem to have no idea at all how women are put together.

Once, after a particularly demoralizing 30 minutes trying on bathing suits in Dillard’s, a saleswoman noticed how depressed I looked when I stepped out.

“It’s not you,” she said. “It’s the clothes.”

I will love that woman forever.

***
I haven’t mocked press releases for a while so here are some excerpts that made me slump.

This one arrived today:

Holiday shopping, a busy travel schedule and dry winter weather. Feeling overwhelmed yet? Recharge and get in the spirit with the enticing scent of cranberries in XXXXXXX wash and lotion.

This refreshing duo provides the perfect pick-me-up for tired hands and feet. Integrate them into your daily beauty regime to soothe seasonal stress. Festive XXX puts the “happy” back in front of holidays.


I understand that they’re pitching in time to make it into magazine holiday round-ups, but no, I’m not feeling overwhelmed yet and I don’t want to get into the spirit. I want to make it through the last of summer.

I am of the opinion that press releases should never ask questions because when they do, my answer is almost always, "No."

How about:

2008 is a year all about POWER, the struggle for it (politically), the display of it (athletically), and the conservation of it (economically and environmentally). This fall, XXX launches its olfactive answer to the question of what is power and how is it being redefined by modernity.

In an unprecedented partnership with prolific Japanese designer and art director of XXX proposes a powerful new identity for masculinity, one centered on simplicity, honesty, and an imaginary flower.

I don’t know which I like better, the “olfactive answer to the question of what is power” or “simplicity, honesty, and an imaginary flower.” Actually, this release is so ludicrous, it’s compelling.

I have to leave the product name in here because it’s part of the joke. The lame joke:

If you have commitment phobias, Sircuit has a product that will make you say Eye Dew!

This also arrived today:

With the winter months beating down upon us, it’s crucial that we prepare, protect and hydrate to keep our skin healthy all year round.

I just realized that they probably meant bearing down not beating down. At least I hope so.

Nothing wrong with this pitch, it just gets a shout-out for the unnecessary quotation marks:

As you are probably are aware, one of the "hottest" topics in the health, family, youth and beauty arenas right now is the safety and performance of sun block products.

And here’s one working much too hard:

Whether you are climbing the side of a mountain, kayaking through a canyon, or snorkeling off the coast, outdoor adventures render picturesque moments that deserve to be displayed and remembered. Present the moments you capture along the journey in a XXX.

XXX has just recently announced the XXX, a premium, hard-bound digital photo book. By simply uploading digital photos, XXX technology allows users to organize photos and preserve memories—like the time the canoe flipped— in the form of professional-looking photo book.

If the canoe flipped, would you really have photos? Or would you have a ruined digital camera? OK, presumably someone else’s canoe flipped … I’ll allow it. But it seems such a non sequitur…

***

Thanks to FrontBurner for finding this video, of a drunk and giddy Kelly Clarkson at a Red Sox game:



I've always like Kelly Clarkson and now I like her even more.

And thanks to Very Short List for this oddly moving and simply odd little film that puts a balloon into famous movie scenes. I don’t know why I was compelled to watch all six-plus minutes but I couldn’t stop.

Labels: art, flotsam, marriage, pop culture, press releases, shopping, television

Did anyone see the Chris Rock special on Comedy Central this weekend—his “Never Scared” show?

Tom and I caught the last 40 minutes or so—and since we celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary on Sunday, we felt justified in laughing our asses off at his riffs about marriage. “Married people are disgusting!” Rock said and we howled at our own disgustingness. “You ever been to dinner with six neutered adults?”

Yeah, we’re boring.

“Married and bored or single and looooonely,” Rock said.

“All good relationships are boring,” he said. “The only exciting relationships are the bad ones.”

We laughed hardest at the “grown man playdate”—wives putting their husbands together in a room so they can make friends. “He likes baseball, just like you…”

Oh god, the grown man playdate. We have so been there and will be there again. I’ve had a few close friends whose husbands were such a bad match for Tom, the playdate was painful to witness. We gave up ever trying to make it work and settled for socializing only sans boys.

I have other friends with husbands Tom can make nice with (and vice versa) now and then, but it’s a stretch. By the end of a long evening, Tom is worn out and retreats to his happy place. I can see it happen and it’s time to go home.

We have some couples friends we can hang with easily, although we wouldn’t necessarily choose to hang with our same-sex counterparts one-on-one. As a foursome it works, as twosomes, not so much.

From time to time, in the perpetual quest for new couples friends, we go on couples dates, which are every bit as awkward and stressful as date-dates. Sometimes couples first dates end with everyone getting way too drunk—just like date-dates. Sometimes second dates occur, sometimes everyone slinks off and pretends the whole thing never happened. Sometimes these first dates feel like we have found our soulmates but more often than not, it was just a deceiving first-date glow.

The quest for couples friends is one of the difficulties of marriage that no one tells you about. Are you old enough to remember the show Thirtysomething? What a big lie that show was. Once past their 20s, few people have a gang to run with anymore. It’s the couples-friends version of all the rosy romantic bullshit that is shoved down our throats our whole lives. Just like romance fades into boring (if comforting and no less valuable) marriage, friendships get more peripheral and less vital—and I don’t mean less important, but they pulse with less juice. If you have one or two decent friendships on top of your marriage, you’re ahead of a lot of people.

I found Rock’s Married People schtick on YouTube and I’m laughing at it again. I won’t post it here, what with the whole copyright thing, but go find it yourself. If you’re married, you can laugh at yourself. If you’re single, feel free to laugh at me.

Labels: comedy, friendship, marriage, pop culture, relationships

Tom and I are still sometimes surprised to realize how long we've been together. Somehow or other, we got this marriage thing pretty well figured out. Who knew we were capable?

I was thinking about this and herewith are

The Unofficial Rules of Our Marriage

1. Required: Politeness, i.e. please and thank you. Thank each other for cooking dinner and all other household chores. Treat each other as well as, or better than, we treat friends and strangers.

2. Required: Acknowledge when we’re taking work and other stuff out on each other. Pissiness is permissible from time to time, but if it’s inappropriately directed at the other, the target may object and the offender is expected to acknowledge and apologize. This rule does not apply to appropriately aimed pissiness—that then requires further discussion. (See Rule 8.)

3. Suggested: Cut each other slack and assume that unless something indicates otherwise, pissiness is the result of stress and should not be taken personally.

4. Suggested: Whoever is busiest and most stressed may expect the other to pick up some household slack for the duration.

5. Required: Each has the right to decline to participate in activities the other plans, however we also each have the right to specifically request the other’s presence when we feel it most important.

6. Suggested: Praise and strokes—you’re never too old. Be generous with both.

7. Required: Kisses at all hellos and good-byes and before bed.

8. Required: When problems arise, they are to be dealt with promptly and politely. Anger is permissible but fights must be fair and kind.

9. Required: Honest mistakes are forgiven without rancor.

10. Required: Sophie gets coffee in bed every morning. Hey, he started it…

I would love to hear the unofficial rules of others in long-term relationships.

Labels: marriage, personal growth, relationships

I don't have anything fresh to say today so I'll say something stale. (For me, anyway.)

This column is a couple of years old but I never managed to sell it so I thought I'd give it away here, just because I've always liked it.

A long time ago I stumbled on a news release about research that said: "Couples who laugh together and intentionally reminisce about that shared experience are likely more satisfied with their relationship than couples who don’t have that reservoir of experience to draw on, according to research by an Appalachian State University psychology professor."

At first, the research seemed absurd. I planned to blog and mock it. I don't think I did and that's a good thing, because I remembered it when I wrote this essay.

Marriage of My Unnecessary Discontent

At a luncheon recently, I ran into an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in many years.

“Did you get married? I think the last time I saw you, you were about to get married,” she said.

I laughed. “Eleven years ago!” I replied. “The last time I saw you, I think you were pregnant.”

“My son is 11 years old,” she said. And so we agreed, it had been 11 years since we’d last seen each other.

That night, as my husband and I loaded our dinner dishes in the dishwasher, he mused, “We’ve been together 20 years. This year will be our 15^th wedding anniversary.”

Busted.

Well, I busted myself anyway, and confessed my mistake that afternoon. Tom looked annoyed and I don’t blame him – especially since this wasn’t the first time I’d forgotten how long we’d been married. I forget more often than I remember. Same with the date of our anniversary. I know it was July 4^th weekend, since we married in Dallas and it was the world’s sweatiest wedding. But the only way I can remember the exact date is by remembering 7/6, or ’76 -- the year of my high school graduation – which is evidently better seared in my mind that what most women consider the most important day of their lives.

As for the year – I still can’t tell you without doing some math. Let’s see, it’s 2006, we’ll celebrate our 15^th anniversary in July, so I was married on July 6, 1990. No, wait, that’s wrong -- 1991. I was never any good at math. I am better at marriage than at math, and yet I seem to struggle with that, too.

Am I ambivalent about my marriage?

Actually, I’m ambivalent about marriage in general.

I never thought much about marriage as a girl growing up on the Upper West Side, surrounded by artists and iconoclasts. I yearned for boyfriends, yes. I looked forward to discovering sex, too. But marriage? It just wasn’t on my radar. I didn’t, like so many girls, plan my fantasy wedding, I didn’t imagine the man I’d grow old with (unless John Lennon freed up). I had no visions white picket fences etc. I can’t explain that, except that I always liked to imagine myself different and different people didn’t do anything as bourgeois as marrying. (Besides, like the boys in the Squid and the Whale, I was led to believe that my family was swimming in a sea of philistines and only a certain amount of deprivation and artistic garret-suffering was an admirable life. A happy marriage was simply too cozy for that sort of thing.)

Perhaps I would have given marriage more thought – one way or another -- had I been a product of a divorced home. But in defiance of national statistics, my parents and my husband’s parents are still married to each other – although both sets of parents had a midlife split for a time. (Two years, in my parents’ case, around the time I graduated high school.) In many ways, I took my parents’ marriage for granted.

Yet I also am startled to find myself following in their connubial footsteps.

My husband and have no reason but love and compatibility to stay together. No melancholy experience of broken homes bind us to our vows. We are childless, so no dependents compel us to honor our troth. We both work, so neither of us is entirely financially dependent on the other (though, as a freelance writer, my quality of life would certainly take a hit if I should I be forced to live on only my own income, unless I managed to step things up considerably).

I’m not bragging. I’m puzzled. And, in a very strange way, a little ashamed.

When I read about yet another celebrity break-up, or about a woman with more than one husband in her history, or hear about a couple I know who is splitting, I’m supposed to be saddened, sympathetic, perhaps even a little bit smug. Oddly, I feel none of those things. Instead, I feel inadequate and threatened. Do these people know something I don’t know? Are multiple marriers more discerning than I? More adventuresome? More nuanced in their needs? More … interesting?

I recently read Gail Sheehy’s new book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman, which is full of women my age (47) and older who leave their leaden husbands to discover themselves, or who are abandoned by their husbands, leaving them free to discover themselves and their multi-orgasmic capabilities. Many of these women staunchly reported that weren’t interested in remarriage, that life was better, freer and more fulfilling on their own. And they were getting laid plenty, thank you very much. A few women in the book were married, but they were somewhat more opaque about their lives – protecting their husbands, I imagine.

Or perhaps, like me, they feel funny about staying unfashionable hitched.

Long-term relationships are only theoretically admired in our culture. Healthy ones appear only rarely in film and literature and almost never in pop music, except country (Kathy Mattea’s tearjerker Where Have You Been, Johnny Cash’s transcendent Memories Are Made of This). In popular culture past and present, new love is romantic, frustrated love is romantic, torch carrying is romantic. But long-term relationships are most often portrayed as stultifying, tainted by seething resentments and unspoken disappointments. Love is Jack and Ennis. Marriage is, well, their marriages. Harpies they can’t wait to escape. Disappointment and disillusionment. Ties that bind too tightly.

A couple of years ago, my marriage went through a painful stretch when my husband and I seemed to be careening towards the abyss of divorce in separate cars. To our credit we did (to torture the metaphor) both put the brakes on before it was too late and, with a lot of hard, self-revelatory work, eventually (to now beat it to a bloody pulp) traded our old jalopies for an improved, new-model marriagemobile.

As we worked our way back together, we found ourselves taking an informal and spontaneous months-long inventory of the running one-liners we had collected over the years – those little, inexplicable, you-had-to-be-there inside jokes we had accumulated with our memories and tossed out at appropriate moments.

“IT’S A MULE DEER!”

“That is not possible.”

“Did you WALK to Provincetown?”

“Feels good, though.”

“Pickles and olives in the SAME DISH?”

Nobody gets the jokes and we don’t try to explain them. It doesn’t matter. They belong to us. Each refers to a specific moment and, they are, in a way, the glue that held us together when in other ways, we were breaking apart. “That’s another one,” we’d say, each time one of us tossed one out and we would both smile. These little touchstones represent an important part of what brought us together – similar senses of humor and an ear for the absurd. And they represent history, our irreplaceable shared past.

One-liner by one-liner, Tom and I found our way back to each other. Oh, it took more than that, of course. Counseling. Difficult conversations. Time apart and time together. Determination. Courage. Blind faith. Fear of the unknown. Horror of dating again. (“If we were to break up, this would be our dating pool,” I said to Tom at a Neil Young concert. We looked around at a grizzled crowd of Hawaiian shirts and Mom-jeans and shuddered.)

Maybe I’m just afraid of intimacy. I suppose that’s the easiest explanation for the fight I have with myself not to flee from what most people spend their lives seeking. I’m sure that’s part of it but that’s not all of it. My fear of having a happy marriage is my own personal, inexplicable bugaboo. I push against it continually, even as I settle back into my revived marriage. Besides, don’t America’s divorce statistics tell me that by staying married, we are actually still being a little bit different from the norm? Isn’t divorce as bourgeois as marriage these days? And in what parallel universe do I imagine more happiness alone in a garret than with a man who loves me in a little stone house on three acres? Our marriage isn’t perfect but it has taken us this far, held together with his tolerance for my poor memory, my appreciation for his solidity (and tolerance), and a string of one-liners.

And, the more I think about, the more marriage seems less a solid form, an impenetrable brick fortress than -- like the atoms that make up matter – a dense collection of tiny moments comprising the whole. Marriage is forever, but forever is this minute, and this minute, and this minute and so on and so on for as long as Tom and I still laugh together, still look after each other, still maintain the magnetic field that keeps the moments together. Is that really so scary?

“What is it about us? How is it we’re still married when so many people get divorced?” I mused to Tom as we drove home from dinner at a favorite restaurant, not long after that luncheon where I’d lopped years off our marriage.

“What people?” he said, annoyed again. (And, again, I can’t blame him.) “Most of our friends are married.”

“I know,” I stammered. “But, you know. Celebrities… the divorce rate... so many people …”

“True,” he conceded. “Maybe people aren’t meant to mate forever.”

“I know,” I said, “It makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with us. If we’re …”

“Lazy?” he interjected. I laughed.

“Yeah.”

We fell silent.

Later that night, as often happens, I fell asleep with the television on. I woke several hours later to the blare of some sort of X-games, the commentator shrieking into his mike. Tom awakened at the same moment, fumbled for the remote among the bedding and turned the television off.

“That was really loud,” I mumbled.

He chuckled. “Yeah, it was,” he said.

“Hey,” he muttered before dropping back to sleep. “I was watching that.”

That’s another one.

I smiled into my pillow as I drifted back off myself, feeling loving and loved.

And pleasantly married.

Labels: divorce, marriage, psychology, relationships