The hardest thing about marriage is staying married. It's got nothing to do with sex. It has to do with money and power. Mostly power.
My mother‑in‑law made me get married. I'd been living with my wife for eight years and one night "mom" says, "I guess you guys are never gonna get married. I mean, you've been through jail together, you're living together, but. . oh, forget it."
"Oh, well," I said, "put it like that and I'll marry your daughter tomorrow."
Actually, I don't know what we were waiting for, except that for a guy it's never the right time to get married. In this case, I think we were both stalling. I'm also a bit suspicious of any two people who don't struggle with that decision. For instance, I can't imagine meeting someone and getting married days later. I don't know how these movie stars do it! Marriage is a big decision. Big enough to procrastinate almost a decade.
Part of my problem was that I was still lusting in my heart after other ladies. But somehow I knew that I wasn't going to find another woman remotely as great as my soon‑to‑be wife. It's a good thing my mother‑in‑law finally spoke up.
I finally gathered my courage one day when we were having a picnic, and popped the question. I also gave my wife a big tourist pamphlet about Switzerland. I wasn't taking any chances.
She said no.
It killed me. I felt sick to my stomach. I lost my appetite. Our dog just stared at me, thinking, "If you're not going to eat your lunch, I will." Finally, I said, "But the Switzerland trip is yours if you marry me."
"Switzerland," she said, "is filled with precise, humorless people.
"Maybe I should have suggested Paris?"
For a minute it seemed as if my change in travel plans would rate a solid "maybe." But she said no again.
When we woke up the next morning, she told me that she'd slept on my proposal. "I guess I was a little rude to you last night," she explained. Meanwhile, I'm figuring I'm off the hook for this marriage thing for at least another eight years. I could afford to be generous.
"I asked, you said no. It's okay," I said. I might have looked a little too relieved because later that day she gave me a little box. Inside was a gold watch. On the back was inscribed: "Yes. I've reconsidered."
I liked the watch, so I did the right thing.
- -
A lasting marriage is like a job. But here's the problem with jobs: They're great when you first get them. Then about a week into it you realize, "There are a few problems here." Then they get repetitious and boring. And pretty soon you think that the guy in the next cubicle has a much better job, which would suit you just fine.
The trick is to get past this.
The first time I dated my wife I envisioned us very old, sitting side by side on a couch. I've kept that picture in my mind forever. When you're old and ugly you're not really in the mood to go barhopping. The person you're with is about all you're going to get. Believe it or not, this can be a comforting image.
Sometimes the urge to merge with someone else really struggles to get the better of a guy. The urge is not unusual. It's not wrong. It's biology. The male drive to inseminate as many young and attractive females as possible before he passes out from skipping lunch is responsible for the rapid spread of our species and its survival. The trouble is that if you're married and you fool around, and your wife finds out, citing Scientific American works about as well as saying the guys in your bowling league all did it, too. Either way, you can end up sleeping in the front yard.
"But, honey, I did it for the sake of mankind."
"I got your mankind right here," she'll say, motioning at her ovaries.
- -
A woman I once dated told me stuff I never wanted to know.
"It was just one football team and it was just one Sunday afternoon."
"Why did you tell me that?"
"I just feel better telling you," she said.
"Right. You feel better. You fool around, you live with it."
"But it's the seventies. We shouldn't have secrets from each other."
"I guess you're right. Here's a few secrets I've been meaning to tell you: I never liked The Partridge Family. I hate the cheesy powder‑blue leisure suit you bought me. And, by the way, we're through!"
I think the lesson here is clear: Football isn't such a dumb game, after all.
- -
I love spicy, rich food. I avoid it because it makes me feel both bloated and about to explode. Similarly, I don't believe that monogamy is a biological truth, particularly for men. But I still don't fool around because my wife would put a grenade in my pants. That's feeling bloated and about to explode.
I think about sex all the time. Still. That's the difficult thing about marriage. And that's why I love discouraging young people with a clear picture of marital reality: "If sex is the reason you're getting married, then you shouldn't be getting married. I wouldn't get married just to have sex with the same person forever. You get married to have a family."
Monogamy is possible. Painful, but possible. After a fast, torturous transition period, during which a guy has to sort out all these issues for himself, things get better and suddenly extramarital excursions are no longer an issue. This happens when we're about eighty. Earlier, if you count the side effects of the antidepressants or blood‑pressure medicine. Either way, this stuff is tough for every man. The lunatic wants to stay loose. But by this age we know the lunatic well. It lives inside us night and day. The lunatic is tired of not having his way. The lunatic just wants to make trouble and noise. The lunatic wants to push us as close to death as possible, and pervert our last few drops of morality for its profane purposes. (Personal reminder: Call Stephen King.)
Now, quick! Get out your pencils and index cards. Here's my secret recipe for fidelity. First: I begin by telling myself I can do anything I want to do. That way, I don't act like a child and do something stupid just because I've been told "no." I don't curb my desire to murder people, either. I just don't do it. I add just a pinch of control, feel the feelings, let them simmer and evaporate. Never let your oven get too hot. Second: If and when sexual temptation is added to the mix, I can see clearly the right course of action without having my decision cluttered by my natural disrespect for authority. It helps if you season to taste with a woman who can accept that these feelings exist in a man, and if she can coexist with him and not make him feel bad about who he is. Fini! You can serve her that healthy, delicious relationship she thought only existed in cheap romance novels.
But be careful that she doesn't want you to wear blousy pirate shirts and change your name to Rafe.
Speaking of cheap romance, I always thought it would be great to live like an ancient Chinese warlord and have multiple wives. That would solve a lot of problems. If one makes you mad, you run to the other. On the other hand, what if you made them both mad? You're a warlord, for crying out loud. You run to another.
"Honey, I'm home from a hard day slaughtering barbarians."
"Don't talk to me, you armor‑plated goon. Go back to your hordes."
"Fine. Be that way. I'll just go over to Gladys's or Helen's, then."
"Go ahead. You think we don't talk to each other during the day?"
Does sex change after marriage? I take that back. Isn't that the silliest question in the world? Of course it does. Only you don't want to tell your single friends the truth, because then no one would get hitched. And you don't want to think about it much either, because it's just too damn depressing.
The good thing is that reduced frequency just sort of creeps up on you, and stays with you, like midriff bulge. One day your pants are tight, but you know you don't have the time or energy to do anything about it. This is bad, but not as bad as one day realizing, as you're doing it, that two adults crawling all over each other and making funny noises are a ridiculous sight. Somehow you can't quite remember why this stuff ever seemed so damn important, why it drove you nuts and made you do crazy things just to quell that burning sensation.
Don't let this happen to you:
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Me? Look at you!"
I called a good friend of mine once to talk about this, because I was so worried about my libido's falling asleep. I didn't exactly know how to broach the subject. So I just blurted it out.
"When you're in bed, how much do you do it?"
He laughed. "Oh, I don't know. Last time must have been four months ago. Maybe five."
"What?"
"Tim, I have three kids, two jobs. You both want to, but the kid comes in, the kid's sick. Every time a Saturday night seems free, something else happens. And all these magazines say you've got to dedicate a night. Yeah, well, that's great; it's all good in theory. But if you're mad at your wife-and you're mad about, what, thirty percent of the time? or just irritated-then making love is the last thing in the world that you want to do. So there's a lot of things working against sex in marriage."
Suddenly I realized it was marriage working against sex.
Some wise guy with a small bank account once said that if you put a penny in a jar every time you make love the first year you're together, and take one out every time after that, no matter how much you have sex in subsequent years you'll never empty the jar. Maybe so. That is one reason why I used silver dollars. And when I took them out of the jar, I put them in another jar. I've got my golden years to think of.
Look, if we're hungry we eat. If we want to make love badly enough, we do it. But as life goes on and kids come and responsibilities grow, time becomes precious and there's not all that much room to fit in both lovemaking and a couple hours for the little lady to read Cosmo.
- -
Sometimes a man has no control over himself.
My wife and I once walked into a real‑estate office looking for a house in Los Angeles. Right away I sensed something. It came in below my defenses. I got a giraffe neck, twisted around, and saw a woman sitting in an agent's booth clear across the room. She did a hair toss and started rubbing her neck. Before I knew it, I postured: my chest went straight out, my shoulders straight back. We locked eyes. The chemistry was instantaneous.
Meanwhile, my wife was discussing second trust deeds with our agent, but I had a tough time paying attention. Every time I looked up, the woman was staring at me. She'd moved into the liplicking phase. We were like two pacing animals. She could have been the mother of six, and I'd have still wanted her.
Finally, I turned to my wife and said, "Do you smell anything weird?"
She goes, "Why? Did you fart or something?"
"No. I smell something. Is there anything going on here that you can recognize?"
She looked around and said, "Other than that woman staring at you?" A smile played over her lips. "She wants you, Tim."
My chest inflated another millimeter and I said, "I know that."
"And you're telling her that you want her," she said, looking at my pathetic pecs.
"What? I didn't do anything!"
"Look at the way you're standing," she said. "You're posturing."
"Oh."
"Sit down."
"I just want to smell her, to be near her. It's nothing personal."
"Sit."
That's why I love my wife.
What happened had almost everything to do with smell. It's that pheromone thing, the little chemical agents we all give off that pretty much say, "Hey! You over there. If you like my aroma, I'm available." Or "Hmm. What's that cologne you're wearing?" It's always a good idea to have an agent do your negotiating for you.
"No cologne. But I didn't shower this morning."
Oh.
Dogs are really good at this. Fortunately, people are sufficiently evolved to restrain themselves from sniffing each other's behinds. But it's the same thing. It's out of control. It's animal. It's what that book The Bridges of Madison County is all about. It's why women swoon over big‑screen male sex symbols like Robert Redford and Tom Cruise. Either that or the theater owners finally figured out a way to put pheromones in the popcorn butter flavoring.
When this happened to me at the real‑estate office, my body wanted to find a way to stay there-alone. The evil lunatic inside said, "Take your wife home. Say you left your jacket behind-it worked at Gilbert Dennison's house, didn't it? Come back here and fulfill your biological destiny."
My mind was churning. I began to rationalize the emotional consequences. "I've got to see her. So. . I'll kill my wife, quit my job, and take the real‑estate lady and all my money and we'll go live in Indiana. I'll get a job in a hardware store and we'll just do it, do it, do it, all day and all night!"
I finally snapped out of it, but only because I heard my wife mumbling something about the thighs on the pool guy.
- -
In school, if one girl was mad at her boyfriend, all the other girls were mad at theirs. Things haven't changed much.
Women's systems run better warmer. Men are like slow‑pumping diesels and women are like high‑test motors. They run better when they're hot. Men are more lopey, like Harleys. Women are like Ferraris. Those engines have to be heated up. I don't mean this sexually. I mean women seem to overheat a lot. They run better when they're angry. Anger does something to them.
This is not something you can avoid by deciding not to get the woman in your life angry. You have no choice and no control. She'll get angry all by herself, and if you just happen to be standing in the middle of her road, you get the full exhaust.
My wife can just stand there yelling at me, calling me names, for no apparent reason. When she finally sees how forlorn I am, and if I haven't apologized for anything out of abject fear or actual guilt, she'll say, "I'm not mad at you."
"Well, you're yelling at me."
Now she's mad at me. "Why do you always think it's about you?"
"Like I said, you're yelling at me."
"Why is it always you?" And now she's pissed off at me.
Women always think they're right. Women think men think they're always right. You hear this all the time. But women really think they're right. Oddly enough, women do have a calmness about them that suggests that they really do know something we don't. Men aren't a total loss, but women are completely confident in areas we're not, like the social graces. We just avoid all that stuff and concentrate on motors, bridge building, shoe shining, and knowing how to section half a grapefruit properly. Women act aloof from this typical male stuff because it frightens them.
And then they need a man around.
Honestly, I get angry always being in the wrong. Worse, I hate it when I realize that women have somehow convinced me of this. It's a very short and dangerous trip to the land of no self‑esteem. Once upon a time a woman could have told me potatoes grow on trees and I would have believed her.
What is it with women trying to emasculate men? Is it all women, or just the ones I hang out with? It always starts with small things: how stupid I am, or demeaning my clothes.
"I can't believe you're going to wear that, I can't believe you're going to eat that, I can't believe you leave the seat up. You're so Cro‑Magnon." It's always something I've done.
A woman will bitch and complain about having to do some task, so I'll do it, and then she'll complain about how I did it or that I'm doing something for myself that has no relation to her.
These compulsions are really about a woman's desire to control something. Men, stereotypically, are the breadwinners, so women want to control the household. The cave. Naturally, we let them do it, but they know that if they're not bringing in the paycheck, they don't really control the household. I know. I know. Lots of women do bring in a paycheck. Must we lose everything?
We let them control the kids because, after all, they have them. We also know that if we just slip Junior a couple of bucks he'll do what Dad wants.
Women do control childbirth, which scares the hell out of men and makes us feel so worthless that it explains why we felt we had to otherwise own the world.
- -
With men, being a bonehead is all related to our lack of concentration.
"Gosh, I just wasn't thinking. I totally forgot. I didn't mean to hurt you. That was not my intent."
"Well, what the hell was your intent?"
Every guy's been in this position, and you've just got to learn to ride it out. Sure, women expect us to think all of the time, but who can? It takes a lot of energy that would be better spent trying to find the Makita saw she took and somehow misplaced.
Still, men lapse in and out of consciousness all day long. Women are always conscious. They're always thinking. And as social, responsible beings, they think laterally: "This act would probably hurt that person."
Men think vertically. "What can I do to go higher, get there, move that, acquire this?" Men are on autopilot. We're always comparing ourselves to the next guy and what he's got. That's how we're defined. Within twenty minutes of meeting another guy, a guy will always hear, "So what do you do?"
Women ask the same question.
Actually, it's not such a stupid question coming from a woman these days. If a guy is an ax murderer, a woman should try to find out as soon as possible. If he's an emergency‑room technician or if he handles dangerous radioactive chemicals, it's good to know right away. I know one woman who insists this line of questioning is a North American trait. In other localities, like India, it's "How many cows do you have?"
Here's what also gets under my skin. If men are such boneheads, what are women? It seems to me women get off the hook all the time. My wife's apologies are much quicker than mine. Maybe it's because she's so used to being right. I don't think men are wrong more than women. We just take the blame more than women.
Let me sum it up this way: When you're courting, there's a lot of good behavior on both sides-and you aren't ever going to see it again until one of your parents dies.
- -
I've never gotten over being shocked that someone as physically small as my wife can make me so angry-and get me to believe it's all my fault. My wife is very much like the man. I'm very much like the woman. I'm the one who's always getting punished.
When we're driving, it's crazy. I'm behind the wheel and she's saying, "Turn left!" I'll turn left. Then she says, "No, this wasn't right." So I say, "Why did you tell me to turn left?" I could have driven this route seventeen times and she's going, "Don't. . turn up here!" But I do, and then wonder why. Now I'm lost because I listened to her. Why? It's all about power.
"Why do I listen to you?"
"Well, I don't go that way," she says.
"Fine. But you're not driving," I say. "When you're driving I don't tell you which way to go. I assume you know-and very often you don't, and you'll blame me for not telling you where to go."
And at that point I'd like to tell her exactly where to go.
I have no idea why I listen to her when I already know where fm going. If she had been driving and I'd done the same thing, she would have belted me. When she screws up, she just says, "Aw, well, this was stupid," and then just moves on.
I go, "Hey! Hey!" I wait for these moments. When she's finally wrong, fm ready to bring up all the other times that she accused me of doing the same stupid thing and how I had to humiliate myself begging for her forgiveness.
But she won't cop to anything.
The only time I get an apology is when she's made the same type of mistake I have, close enough to when I did it, so there's no way she can say, with a straight face, that she doesn't remember.
I still felt I wasn't getting my share of apologies, so I got a computer just to keep track of this stuff. It's all cross‑referenced, and I've even got it to print out pie charts of our transgressions as well as cross‑referencing them to argument topics, argument duration, and intensity.
- -
Take heart. Marriage can be fun. Wives are women, too. And they can be lots of fun. I love to travel with my wife. Her female sensibilities are so different that I always see the world in new ways. We're on a trip, we're highly excited, we behave better, the romantic spark that linked us returns, she reads the Autobahn and Autostrada road maps like a pro. (Besides, you can't make any quick left turns at two hundred kilometers an hour, with a big Benz on your tail.) We go to nice hotels, eat great meals, get dressed up, marvel at the wonders of the world. And the wonders of our enduring partnership. If you get away now and then, you can look at your life from a new point of view. It's refreshing. And I'm not just saying this to be nice.
If we hadn't had a child, we'd probably never come home.
Pretty soon we can take her with us.
- -
As I'm sure you realize, I've been speaking in generalizations for comic effect. And I've changed some names to protect the guilty. As Kurt Vonnegut once said in the epigraph of an early novel, the innocent don't need his protection because "God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine."
In this book, I've said, "Men are like this, and women are like that." But not necessarily. I know many women who are like this. I try to stay away from the guys who are like that. That is not what this book's about.
The older you get, the more you realize there are fewer absolutes in the world and more perspectives. Stereotypes do describe the more common occurrences, but not always.
Life before marriage is a great time of life. Then one day everyone has to join the real world: jobs, love, and settling down. And no more bullshit. The people I knew who didn't settle down are now dead.
"Whatever happened to Joey?"
"Died."
"Marjorie?"
"Went to a commune and died."
Just want to see if you're paying attention.
Imminent death notwithstanding, this doesn't mean you have to sacrifice your ideals. It just means forcing your ideas to mesh with the real world. Once upon a time I thought I could change the world. Now, although I have influenced part of the world we live in, I still come home from work and hope that dinner's on the table. Before the meal, I'll watch TV and gather myself. This is something men do, like the caveman who just stared at the fire after a long day's hunting. We commune long and hard with the electronic embers, not wanting to speak with anybody.
Later, after I've talked to the wife and played with the kid, and helped clean up the dishes, I'll disappear into my garage workshop, where I can manipulate my own little world to my heart's content. And in there it's so nice being married.