Happy marriages

Old ycronam is still far enough under the weather that we canceled our dinner plans and stayed home last night. Dinner by the fire and "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing", a sweet 1987 Patricia Rozema film about art, honesty, imagination, love and life.

So, how is it that I'm so happily married? What does it take?

Some, like CW, insist it's all about commitment, determination, sticking it through thick and thin, and so on. I guess if you don't get lucky and/or make the right choice, that's the only way to get through the damned thing. Maybe one can have a successful marriage under those terms, but not a happy one.

For a happy marriage, you've got to have two people who are each capable of happiness, a good match of attitudes, values and interests, and a large dose of kindness and patience.

There's a lot of luck involved. First, in that combination of nature and nurture that yields two adults that are both reasonably decent people who are happy with life's prospects. Genetics can produce a colicky baby who grows up to be a whiny adult. Or a child might get good genes but grow up in an emotionally unsupportive environment that produces an adult who is untrusting, or unkind, or frequently depressed. Unhappy adults rarely have happy marriages.

The second piece of luck comes in being at the right place at the right time. If Mister Right or Miss Perfect doesn't cross your path when you're both available, you are SOL*.

And the third piece of luck comes in the extent and duration of the match. It's hard to know in a matter of months just how well matched you will be for the long run. You may both love some shared activity early on, but there's no way of knowing how long either of you will stay interested in it. You may have the same religious and social values at the beginning, but there's no way of knowing whether or not one of you will have some revelation later on that will take you in different directions. One of you might discover that your faith is hollow and that you cannot believe in God. Or religion may not be important to either of you at the beginning, but then one of you wakes up one day and finds Jesus. When you first meet, you cannot know how either of you will feel about wealth, or poverty, or middle-class life or whatever financial fate awaits you later. If you're childless when you meet, you cannot know how the stresses and joys of parenthood will affect your marriage. These depend in unpredictable ways on whether you have one child or many; whether your children are healthy or not; and on the kids' personalities.

And there's no way of knowing how age itself will affect you:

I once heard a woman in her late sixties -- call her Sally -- complaining about her 90-something year old mother -- call her Nel. Sally said that, years earlier, Nel's own mother had been a very difficult old lady. Back then Nel had said, "Sally, when I get old, don't let me be like my mother!"

Now Nel is old, and just like her mother. Sally recently reminded Nel "Mother, you said you didn't want to be like Grandma when you got old." 

The old lady responded, "Yes dear. When I was 65, I was a real expert on being 90!"

So there's a lot of luck in whether you will grow apart, or stay close, or grow even closer with the passing years.

I've been very lucky on all accounts. M is my soul mate, my life companion, the person I admire and love most in all the world, the woman who loves and understands me, the woman to whom I never have to explain myself. Well, the last is a bit of an overstatement -- of course I sometimes have to explain, but she's always been understanding and completely supportive of me. To my good fortune, it's always been easy for me to also be understanding and completely supportive of her.

Advice for those considering a life-long commitment? The only suggestion I have is the one my own mother made to me when I was a young man: always be gentle to one another.

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* Shit Out of Luck

Happy Anniversary

22 very happy years of marriage celebrated today.  Don't know why, when I first awoke, I was thinking of the worst day of my life, an awful Christmas Eve fight three years before I met Marie.

Between Marie and me "never a cross word" would be an exaggeration, but there's never been a fight. The cross words are rare. They're sometimes provoked, sometimes not, but they always produce an apology on one side or the other.

Marie is my soul mate – she understands me so well that I never have to explain myself to her.

Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, too. Of course there are times that I have to explain myself. But she always understands the explanation and never argues with it. And I've never had the impulse to argue with her when she explains herself to me.

There are lots of ways in which we see the world differently. After all, she's an artist and I a scientist, so we are presumably dominated by our right and left brains, respectively. But our fundamental attitudes are completely aligned. Neither of us thinks that whatever truths we each hold go beyond the personal to the universal; neither of us thinks that others who see things differently are screwed up; neither of us thinks that we have to force or persuade others to see the world as we do. Both of us see life as a gift.

I remember a windy, rainy late afternoon in Birmingham when Marie was a few minutes late picking me up. This was before cell phones, and we'd agreed on a time and place. I was shivering under an umbrella on a dark street corner, dodging splashes from passing cars and growing more miserable by the minute. "Where the hell are you, woman???" I kept muttering. I was in a bit of a snit when I climbed into the car.

But she's like me -- she was genuinely sorry and apologized with feeling. And I knew that, had the situation been reversed, I might have been a little late and she in a bit of a snit. I knew that she had no ulterior motives, and I knew as I warmed up that we'd soon be sharing a drink, appetizers, good conversation and, a little later, a good meal. Life is too good and too precious to waste on anger at small unintentional offenses. By the time of her second apology, I could honestly say "That's all right. Forget it."

Sadly, this cold has be so far down that we'll have to delay our anniversary dinner tonight to some other time.