Having been blogging almost daily for a couple of years, I am reaching the point—it happens in every relationship—where I fear you have heard all my best stories already.

If you are married or in a similar long-term relationship, you know that this is where love is tested. Does your beloved still manage to feign interest when you launch into your story, again, about seeing the Talking Heads at CBGB before they hit big? (And by “you” I mean “me” and by “your beloved” I mean “Tom.”) Can she work up the slightest hint of sympathy when you lament again about how you were forced to take your cousin to the prom? (And by “she” and “you” I mean nobody I know—I just made that one up. Tom was a big hunk of boy candy in high school, with his denim jumpsuit and white boy fro. He did just fine.) And how about those favorite one-liners that have been worn so thin, you can see straight through them. Must we still laugh? Can we manage even a wan smile?

We must at least show common courtesy when our better halves trot out their stories at dinner parties because no matter how many times we have heard them, others may not have had the pleasure. And so we refrain from slumping face first into our enchiladas or rolling our eyes or finishing the stories for them. It is the right thing to do.

At least with this blog, you may simply click on to something more engaging when I get dull. And if you mock me, as long as you keep it out of the comments, I will never know.

I have been tempted to rummage around in my MySpace blog and rerun some of my favorite old posts, from back when I was fresh and interesting.

Every now and then, Tom manages to trot out a story or piece of information I’ve never heard before, even after 20-ish years of listening to him. This is always very exciting. I pump him for every last detail, wring all I can out of the revelation.

Long-term relationships have an ebb and flow. We get bored, we get interested. We fall out of love and back in and out and in. Of course, we always love each other, but sometimes that love is a low-level hum and sometimes it is a loud, joyful noise.

I’m sure I’ll have a second (or third or fourth) wind here. If I’m inconsistent about posting, it’s because I don’t want to bore you. Besides, most people coming to this blog these days are here to read about Dr. Phil. Speaking of boring.

Labels: blogging, memoir, relationships

Today’s topic: Why are guys with guitars so hot?

The most mild-mannered guys are transformed into sexy things the moment they strap on guitars.

Maybe it’s just me, but judging by the bevy of birthday party girls who were climbing all over Tom at Black & Blue’s gig in Fort Worth Friday night, I think not.

The night started unpromising. By 10:30, there were maybe 15 people in the club, including me and a few friends. But an appreciative crowd grew over the course of the first set and during the break, the girls arrived—a whole flock of ‘em in short-shorts and high heels and glitter everywhere. One wore a tiara. This was good news.

“Those are the girls that are going to dance to Honky-Tonk Women,” I told a friend.

I was right, of course. Honky-Tonk Women was the second song of the second set and that’s when the party really began.

It was, we learned, Kaitlin’s 22nd birthday and she was out in a white sequin tank top, white short-shorts, disco ball earrings and tiara, partying with her posse at the Moon bar. It was a mass of writhing, squealing girls, pressed up to the low stage, wiggling for attention. Kaitlin draped a scarf around Tom’s neck and another girl put a tiara on Steve. The girls would drift off for a minute, to get drinks or take cell phone photos of each other, then return, arms in the air, nipples aimed at the band, shaking their bottoms and shrieking.

This display attracted throngs of beefy frat boys and the dance floor grew increasingly crowded. By Satisfaction and Jumping Jack Flash, the room was a hallucinogenic bacchanalia of dancing. It was a notably rhythmless orgy but heartfelt and enthusiastic.

I’d pay money for copies of the photos taken at the end of the show of Tom, looking sweaty, pleased and bewildered, flanked by young girls, pressing in and posing. It was a MySpace moment in the making.

After the last shutter clicked, the girls wandered off and the club began clearing out.

“What was that about?” Tom asked.

Guitars, baby. They do something to us.

Electric guitars properly wielded instill authority, power, mystery and blatant sex appeal. It works for women too, but they become sexy in a masculine way.

I am first of all awed by the ability to stand on a stage and sing, play a guitar and interact with an audience. The skill alone is a turn-on. I am attracted to competence.

But guitars on men are like stiletto heels on women: an automatic come-on.

Guitarist wield their instruments differently. Tom is low-slung and solid and wears his guitar at groin level. He wears t-shirts or his sleeves rolled up, flashing forearms. When he solos, he plants himself even more firmly and works his instrument. (So to speak.) His playing is crunchy and assertive.

Black & Blue’s other guitarist, Steve, is tall, slender and androgynous. He wears his guitar high. He moves on the stage less than Tom but his connection with his guitar is palpable and his solos are complex conversations.

Both different, both hot.

My first major real life rock-and-roll crush was on a bass player. Bass is hot. It vibrates. Bass players don’t need center stage but can be a band’s backbone. Joel, Black & Blue’s bassist, mostly hangs back on stage. He hasn’t started working the crowd yet or maybe he’s going for mystery. Drummers have to work hard for attention, tucked way back the way they are. Chuck seems to like it. He works his ass off behind his drums and enjoys watching the dramas in front of him.

Girls who chase bands know that dating a bass player is different from dating, say, a lead singer. (What do you call a lead singer without a girlfriend? Homeless. That’s my favorite musician joke.) The ego needs are different. You have to be prepared to do an awful lot of ego-feeding to run with rock stars. Rhythm guitarists have lesser ego needs than lead guitarists. Drummers have low-maintenance egos but are infamously flaky. (What do you call a guy who hangs around with musicans? A drummer. Another good one.)

Here’s my favorite rock-and-roll wife story. It was our first wedding anniversary and Tom’s band du jour, Tex Edwards and the Swingin’ Cornflake Killers, was playing at Taco Land in San Antonio. (BTW, big Cornflake Killers reunion on Aug. 8 at Reno’s in Deep Ellum.) Before the show, as the many bands that day milled around and set up, MsKrit, Tex’s girlfriend, and I were, as always, sitting off to one side watching the scene and entertaining ourselves with caustic narrative. At one point, the wife of some other musician in some other band stood before us.

“You wives and girlfriends of the band?” she demanded.

We nodded.

“Me too,” the woman replied. “Makes ya mean, don’t it?”

That night went on to be an epic rock-and-roll night to remember.

But I digress...

Skill counts in guitar-lust, of course. The first time I saw Kenny Vaughan, a successful studio player in Nashville, was at a small-ish club where we very fortuitously stumbled into a show of Nashville notables playing together for fun. I knew of Kim Richey, Jim Lauderdale and Mandy Barnett, who were part of the group, but I’d never heard of the geeky-cute gangly guy with dark hair and big plastic glasses.

But when he started playing I got flustered. He didn’t have a lot of guitar god moves and wore his guitar on the high side, which is interesting but less sexually explicit than all that groin-level diddling. But Vaughan’s playing had shades of George Harrison, my childhood guitarist crush. His chords and progressions hit notes in me I blush to speak of. I shook his hand after the show and my knees trembled.

Guys and guitars. It just works.

Labels: black and blue, relationships, rock and roll, sex

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

I was intrigued by the Yahoo headline “4 Reasons Why Celebrity Couples Fail.” When I’m not worrying about world hunger and peace in the Middle East, I have wondered why celebrities bother marrying in the first place, considering the odds. (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward vs. everybody else.)

The Yahoo blog post was pretty thin, though. I swear, she just made it all up off the top of her head.

I’ve given my theories a lot more thought.

Reason No. 1: They’re just too damn hot
We all tend to end up with mates who are roughly as attractive as ourselves. So, imagine if your dating pool included George Clooney, Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vanessa Williams—not to mention all those lingerie models and back-up dancers running around looking all hot n shit.

If you’ve ever been to a buffet and ended up with a plate loaded down with enough to feed a small developing nation because everything looks so yummy, then you understand the trouble celebrities must have in settling for just one super-hot spouse.

Reason No. 2: They fall in love on movie sets
Rather than falling in love with each other, they fall in love with the characters they’re playing, then fall out of love once the last vestiges of whoever they were pretending to be drops off and they turn back into regular super-hot, super-rich shmoes.

Reason No. 3: They’re actor-shmactors
Not all of them of course, sometimes they’re rock stars. But movie stars are paid large sums of money to be the characters other people want them to be. Can you turn off that tendency in real life? Will Katie Holmes suddenly one day realize she’s just been playing The Little Woman in a movie called Tom Cruise’s Life and want a new role?

Reason No. 4: Celebrity nurtures narcissism
For people who are even slightly narcissistic to begin with—and I’d argue that anyone who seeks the limelight must have a bit of that—celebrity is like gasoline on a red ember. And that’s not great for relationships. If they find another celebrity (narcissist) mate, they won’t get the attention and adulation they feel is their due. If they find a non-celebrity mate, then they’re probably pretty sure they deserve better.

Reason No. 5: They don’t need the paycheck
Marriage remains an economic arrangement. If you don’t need the money, if you can pay well-trained child care professionals to help with the kids, if you never have to fill the refrigerator or make the bed, if your paycheck is enough to cover your own needs and the needs of your entire extended family, why bother working through the rough patches in a marriage when you can just move on without a blip in your quality of life? What's your motivation?

Labels: celebrities, pop culture, relationships

Instead of getting flotsam on your asses today, I’ll be deep instead. I’m a little rushed so I might be shallow in my deepness, but just because it’s on my mind…

A friend and I have been discussing love—what is it? Can it be defined? Should it be?

I’m a fan of M. Scott Peck’s iconic self-help book The Road Less Traveled in which he defines love as “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s or another’s spiritual growth.”

I always liked that, although my definition of “spiritual” may not be the same as yours. But I do believe love means helping the other person grow—in the direction he or she chooses. That’s pretty key. “Helping” your loved one grow in ways you choose is not love, it’s control. And I like that Peck’s definition of love requires some sort of action, some effort. To my mind, love without action is an empty word--even if sometimes that action means walking away. (If you love something, let it go and blah blah blah.)

My friend likes Robert Sternberg’s theory of three types of love: romantic, companionate and commitment. That also makes sense to me, and the two definitions aren’t mutually exclusive.

But she also questioned whether defining love at all is wise, since it invites judging other people’s relationships. Who are we to say whether another couple is loving or not when we don’t and can’t live in their hearts, minds or relationships? Good point—we can’t know what makes someone else’s relationship work (or not work, for that matter) and to condemn something we don’t understand is just bigotry. And stupidity.

But I would argue that there is benefit to guidelines on what love is and isn’t because a lot of people seem to get confused. Women in abusive relationships sometimes believe their menfolk are driven to abuse because of deep love. Some people confuse sexual desire for love. Some people think that love is static--that once it is declared it need not be tended. Some people think love=drama. (I thank pop culture for that, since companionate love is rarely depicted, except occasionally in country music.) That would probably be my love vice.

But I’m pretty careful with the word “love,” as I am with the word “friend.” I don’t slap it on any old attraction until I’ve thoroughly parsed it.

Tom and I love each other and, I’m sure he would agree, it’s not always easy-cheesy. It’s not just a matter of deciding it, declaring it and getting on with our lives. Sometimes love requires conflict. Sometimes it requires sacrifice. Sometimes it requires boundaries. Sometimes it requires restraint. Sometimes it requires courage. Sometimes it requires saying, “I’m sorry.” (Take that, Ali McGraw.) All of which require effort.

Labels: books, personal growth, psychology, 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