True Ancestor

How to Stay Married Forever

OK, so as of Saturday I'll have been married 15 years, so I'm not really qualified to lecture on this subject. But that's never stopped me before.

I have other good examples to draw from, though, like me True Ann-Sister, who's been with Jacques for about 35 years, all of it on a roller coaster; and the Aged and Revered Parents, who recently celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary. That's as close to forever as I can imagine, in marital terms.

So here are 15 hints I can give you for staying married, one for each year that I've managed not to screw it up.

1. Marry the right person. You can be forgiven for botching this one (after all, I did, the first time around). But if you do botch it, you might as well skip the next fourteen.
2. Recognize that marriage is the Universe telling you that you're not the center of It (see number 6).
3. Admit that the two of you will occasionally be attracted to others -- but resolve not to act on those attractions, especially if you have kids. A friend recently said to me, "I could never have an affair, because that would be being unfaithful to my kids." Even if you don't have kids, your marriage is part of a constellation of relationships. All those relationships will suffer if you have an affair. 
   
4. Make the happiness of your significant other your first thought and action, and last thought and action, of the day.
5. Go ahead and get mad at the other person, but then retreat until you can regain your perspective and your equanimity.
6. Humility is the essence, and the enduring lesson, of matrimony.
7. Become deeply familiar with your love's sense of humor, and play to it a little, every day.
8. Same thing with their appetites for romance, sensual pleasures and whatever other talents they possess. Do all you can to support your love in what they're good at (and here's hoping they're good at the sensual pleasures part).
9. My mom says "Never go to bed angry." I say, "It's OK to go to bed angry. Just be sure to write down your dreams that night."
10. Never underestimate an angry silence.
11. Make most of your gifts imaginative but inexpensive: you don't want to spoil the other person or blow your budget, and you want the really good and expensive gifts to be especially memorable.
12. At least once a year, play a really good practical joke or spring a surprise adventure on your love. Predictability is one of the slow-working poisons of committed love.
13. Love the ones s/he loves. And if you can't -- fake it.
14. Go away on your own every now and then.
15. Serve your love unswervingly through periods of illness and mourning. Nothing kills a relationship like selfishness in a crisis.

Tomorrow is Independence Day in the States, so, in honor of July 4, here's an extra truism:

• Every day is Interdependence Day.

Feel free to chime in with other bromides. We marrieds will appreciate and use all available help.

Happy 4th. Happy Interdependence Day. Happy weekend. Happy Marriage. Shabbat Shalom. Ciao.

--T.A.

The Lonely Heart

There's something so awful about this story that I can't turn away from it:

A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor's widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

My thoughts -- none too original -- in the order in which they occurred to me:

• Only in America ...
• I think about all the Psalms that talk about the heart -- like Psalm 119, which talks about "a whole heart" (v. 2), and Psalm 10, which says, "You [God] prepare their heart," which Rav Kook took to mean, God inclining us heart and mind, body and soul toward the Divine presence. Or Psalm 90, which says, "Teach us to number our days, that we will attain a heart of wisdom." Then I wonder: did this particular heart number its own days?
• Or, put another way: can a heart -- the physical organ -- be inclined toward its own destruction?
• What must it be like to be a woman who's fallen in love with the same heart -- and lost it twice?
• We know that mental stress and heart health are related, but do we know which one determines the health of the other?
• Why is that the people who kill themselves are so often remembered as the selfless ones who would drop everything to help a stranger?
• Will I ever know the answers to any of these questions?
• I need to get back to work.

--T.A.

Middle Daughter, Oldest Daughter: A Study in Contrasts

Middle Daughter is on the third leg of a four-country, eight-month adventure, doing volunteer work and seeing the world before entering college in the Fall. Now, she's sweeping barns and caring for cows at a large dairy farm/kibbutz in the Negev Desert in Israel.

Her blog, and the blogs of her one female and one male fellow traveler, reveal the astonishing contradictions of life in India, and the exhausting realities of life in even relatively well-to-do Costa Rica.

Oldest Daughter was aghast last year, when her younger sister revealed this plan: how could she delay college? Didn't her younger sister want to make something of herself?! To the older sibling -- very directed, very ambitious -- it seemed self-indulgent and hippy-ish.

Middle Daughter responded that heading straight to college was staying sheltered and pampered -- learning from books instead of experience. She wanted to see the world, free of encumbrances and commitments, and she wanted to at least try to do some good while she was at it. She may be academically rusty next Fall, but she'll have a better idea than most of her classmates about what lies beyond the campus.

Oldest Daughter, meanwhile, is trying to line up high-falutin internships with consulting firms in DC or, preferably, Chicago. She is all about Making It. She has a high-powered Washington wardrobe, a burnished resume; she's babysat for high-level officials and she interns with the US Court of Appeals. She knows what's what and who's who in Washington.

This will be the first national election in which both daughters will vote. That will be really interesting to watch. My bet is that Oldest Daughter goes for McCain, Middle Daughter for Obama. Tells you a lot, right there.

They are as close as two completely different people can be. They love each other -- even more now that they don't live under the same roof.

I miss them both.

--T.A.

'We all build our own places of worship, whether we know it or not.'

There's an interesting post over at Jewish Atheist: apparently, a year after posting about intermarriage and interdating, he's still getting comments about it.

I just posted mine:

In my experience -- my first marriage was to a non-Jewish woman, my wife of 14 years is Jewish -- a marriage is more than just love, a commitment to an individual involves more than just that individual, and there are modes of communication, philosophy and spirituality where you may (or may not) find, over time, that you are profoundly different in basic ways from a spouse who comes from an entirely different faith tradition and cultural background.

This doesn't doom the relationship to failure. It just means that love, which supposedly conquers all, really has its job cut out for it.

We are blinded by the popular notion of romantic love. We are told, and tend to believe, that it's this elixir you drink with another person, that gives you both superhuman strength to withstand all trials and tribulations. That's a load of crap. A love relationship usually can't thrive in isolation. It's supported by a web of friendships, associations, support networks, and, yes, even beliefs.

My brother is married to a woman who's an Episcopal priest. They've had a fine married life, but that's partly because her beliefs were central to her, and he had none. He let her beliefs be the guiding principles of the home and of their parenting of their only child. [NOTE TO BROTHER: IS THAT A FAIR CHARACTERIZATION?]

All of which is to say: we all build our own places of worship, whether we know it or not.

What do you think?

--T.A.

Why (and when) I love The Onion

What passes for news these days is wearying: salacious, shallow, just plain wrong.

And there's way too much of it.

It's in troubled times like these -- when the glut of information is nothing more than a deluge of empty calories for the conscience -- that I turn to The Onion.

They know it's therapeutic to make time for yourself, to hate the Yankees, to make fun of motivational speakers and skewer Washington and all who abide there.

Even the Messiah is handcuffed in the Onion's warped world.

Only when nothing is sacred can you start adding important things back, one at a time.

Enjoy the process, and the weekend.

--T.A.

Married for a Lifetime

It has begun to stop bothering me that the One True Wife does not finish her sentences --

"Could you get the ...?"

"I'm hoping you'll ..."

-- because I have begun to finish them in my head.

All the ways that we're different have become bridges to aspects of our respective selves that have gone unexplored.

All the duties we share and shoulder are parceled out according to respective strengths, and time schedules, and predilections, and jobs, with only periodic verbal communication (this ritual is called "doing calendars").

The One True Wife and I have been traveling this summer: to Israel, to Montana, to Denver -- and although we haven't been married that long (14 years), this summer it came to feel as though the epoch of youthful marriage had ended -- one last layer of sentimental sediment had been deposited, in the form of trips taken and memories made -- and now another epoch, form and content, geology and meteorology unknown, has begun.

In little more than a month, Middle Daughter will fly the coop. I will have (mostly) raised and turned loose two stepdaughters, despite the divisiveness engendered by the divorce of their biological parents. We have made a family, despite everything, and that family is growing up.

Gabe faces the experience he dreads -- that of being the only child living at home.

And the One True Wife and I will enter a new age, because we started our marriage with two small children on board, and now we'll have one on the edge of adolescence -- one whose orbit will begin to circle outward toward other constellations we can't detect or fathom. And the Wife and I will have the luxury of mutual exploration and deeper introspection that til now we haven't known.

There will be a lot of changes to talk about here (or not). As the summer ends, and a time of great wonder draws closer, the Wife and I rediscover dormant talents and neglected ambitions, and we discover, for the first time, what it's like to have (or feel like we have) all the time in the world.

--T.A.

Sixty-Five

The other night, the One True Wife and I, along with Sister #3 and her adorable new husband (also #3), took the Aged and Revered Parents out to an upscale Mexican dinner.

If "upscale Mexican" seems like one of those oxymorons like "military intelligence" or "jumbo shrimp," then ponder the astounding fact that the dinner was the occasion of another seeming impossibility: my parents' 65th wedding anniversary.

They were married less than six months after Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. They were married in the year in which The Man Who Came to Dinner and The Pride of the Yankees were box-office smashes.

There's that old joke that goes:

Q: Why do Jewish men die 10 years before their wives?

A: Because they want to.

My parents may be the exception that proves this rule. Surely, spending most of the last 15 years or so in Florida, walking on the beach and basking in the warm sun, has extended their lives, but it also seems to have deepened their love. They spend every damn day together, and they actually enjoy it.

At dinner, Mom presented Dad with a small book of watercolors she'd done that beautifully captured this chapter of their lives together: asleep in bed; chatting over morning coffee and the New York Times; evenings watching a ballgame, or the News Hour, or, more likely just dozing off in front of the TV; it perfectly evoked the quiet companionship and the loving lassitude of this time they've had, and their taste for simplicity. (Besides, what are you going to buy someone you've been married to for 65 years? If dad bought her jewelry, even once every decade, Mom would look like a walking magnet.)

Dad wrote Mom a poem, the last line of which said how lucky he felt to have been married to Helen of Troy all these years.

Holy crap. I thought of her more as Joan Crawford.

(Just kidding, Ma! Drop the coat hanger!)

(For a more accurate assessment of my mother, see this beautiful piece my niece Sara did about her grandma on Huffington.)

I've been reading me True Ann-Sister's posts about rounding the bend from fecundity to irrelevance; and Danny Miller's haunting post about his late mother; and I've been feeling the subtle but undeniable aging of my body, as I struggle to get ready for another middle-age-defying run tomorrow; I restlessly review the torments of my first marriage, and the delights (and, oh yes, the challenges), of my second, "permanent" marriage; and I think, 'How many people of our generation will stay married that long? How many would want to?'

When the One True Wife turned 50 -- and when she created a whole concert of both borrowed and original music, and basically sang her life before her family and friends -- it made me feel, in a way I never had, how the direction, the feeling, the very velocity of life has changed. I had to stop blogging because I had no idea any more why I was blabbing so damn much.

Now I know: the most important thing to blab about is love, in all its forms; and the forces that oppose love, in all their guises.

What else matters?

Thanks, Ma. Thanks, Pa. Long may you wave.

--T.A.

The One True Wife, on the eve of a big birthday

It's a tough time for the One True Wife.

This has one principal cause, to which everything and everyone else is an irritant:

Tomorrow is her 50th birthday.

Getting older happens so fast: me True Ann-Sister was just saying, during the get-together to celebrate Sister #3's wedding last weekend, that she remembered as a kid seeing James Mason in his 30's in a film, and thinking how old he looked; then seeing him in that same film again all these years later, and thinking he looked like a young pup! And that in his later films he looked pretty damn good!

At least, I think that's what she said. My memory's not what it used to be.

The Wife is attentive to her looks without being vain, and solicitous of her body without being neurotic. But the advent of 50, to her, erases the last vestiges of youth, and opens the creaking crypt of old age. She'll be a great old lady, 25 years from now (knock wood). But just now she's a pretty cranky middle-aged one.

She got upset when I told my siblings that she's "throwing herself a party" this weekend. She said that description made the event sound both desperate and self-absorbed, when in fact she just wants to be surrounded by people she loves (and have a chance to perform some music for those people). I wasn't sure why she found my description demeaning, but I soon learned to stop arguing about it.

Most mornings now The Wife performs what I call "The Tummy Dance," in which she stands before the full-length mirror in our bathroom and tries to catch her reflection by surprise before it can suck its tummy in. She turns this way and that, then whips her head around; sighs; holds her midsection in both hands; lets her shoulders droop, and slouches toward her closet.

She complains with conviction about how much harder it is for a woman to grow old than it is for a man. She's increasingly dissatisfied with her vocal and guitar "chops" (she was dissatisfied with her rendition of the Sheva Brachot, the traditional Jewish wedding blessings, which she sang at Sister #3's wedding. Everyone else was pretty impressed). The Wife sees Middle Daughter, in youth's full, beautiful bloom, getting ready to fly the nest; and there are signs with Gabe as well -- rapid growth, eye-rolling sarcasm, increasing distaste for being hugged and kissed -- by his Mom, anyway. Yesterday, he called The Wife from a friend's house and said, "Mom? Is it OK if I have a girlfriend?"

"Why of course, sweetheart, " the Wife said.

"Good," Gabe said. "'Cause I do."

I can see her struggling with this fact: loved though you may be, the process of growing older is a lonely one -- no one can do it for you; no one can accompany you; there's no one who feels exactly what you feel; no one can relieve you of that growing burden.

And, counterintuitively, the mystery of the passage of time seems to deepen with age. Each day is a smaller fraction of one's lifespan than the day before; each day the slope of that span steepens; the speed gathers; the world blurs; you begin to gather yourself in, hoping for a graceful descent: a warm embrace -- then ...

I hope she'll forgive my sharing this with you. It could be a rocky day tomorrow.

But this weekend, it's gonna be a helluva party.

--T.A.

And a room to every purpose under heaven... A time to snore, a time to sleep...

Ann Althouse notes with wry approval the latest architectural trend: separate bedrooms.

Once again, the One True Wife and I are ahead of the curve.

It began a few years ago, when my nocturnal heavy breathing turned into a full-bore snore (right about the time I edged over 200 pounds). After a few visits to an allergist, and a sleep study that might have been gleaned from the how-to manuals of Abu Ghraib (a tasteless exaggeration -- but not by much), I decided to lose some weight. I did, and the snoring diminished. Winter set in, and I gained much of the weight back.

And so the Wife perfected the routine of retreating to the pitch-dark guest bedroom in the basement, along about 3AM. This is when she begins emerging from deeper levels of sleep, and when one violent schnork from me will keep her up, or mostly up, for the rest of the night.

Add to that the confusion of a premature end to hibernation, and you have a recipe for connubial calamity -- if we're both in the same bed. But that's rarely the case through the night. And by the time morning comes, one of us will be in the basement -- she, in full retreat from my snoring, or I, retreating from her out of deference (and a frisson of fear).

In recent weeks, the Wife retreated to the "dungeon" to find respite not only from my snoring but from the early-morning, late-winter sunshine that would come bounding into the room like a white puppy, a little too cheery, a little too early. Spending the morning hours sleeping in the basement kept her from waking up weary, because in our bedroom, she said, "I'd have to sleep with my arm over my eyes and my ears at the same time." I dare you to try that and not get tired.

I don't think our marriage would survive separate master bedrooms. There's something depressingly solitary and self-indulgent about the prospect -- and something deliciously improvisational about sleeping half the night in a room that's theoretically reserved for others. We like to curl up together at the end of the day, talk, decompress and sink into sleep together. Plus, I keep her warm -- my naturally high internal thermostat being one of my principal gifts to the marriage.

So, rather than actually dealing with my snoring, and the host of medical problems that can result from it, we're just going to go sleepwalking through the house in the wee hours, finding different places to rest our weary bones and get a break from each other, which, even in our unconscious moments, turns out to be quite salutary, thank you.

But just a few hours at a time, mind you: once we had separate bedrooms, I'd just be that much closer to being put out at the curb with the rest of the recycling.

--T.A.

Loving Like There's No Tomorrow: Day 1

Somehow, being here with Annie has brought it home: the first phase of my life -- the phase of restless dreaming and assumed immortality, of trying on careers like hats, and of disdaining the aged and infirm because they seem to have been born that way, not immortal like me -- that phase is over.

It's been over for awhile, but it's taken me time to realize it because I've been fortunate. I've been healthy. The people I love have been healthy. Even the people I don't love, but who are loved by the people I love, have by and large been healthy.

That's all different now. To see a sibling, a beloved, kindred soul, so utterly devoted to caretaking, is to learn, the hard way, the most ancient lesson of Nature's own devising: take care of the people you love, because (a) it helps ensure (karmically, if not practically) that someday, someone will do the same for you, if you're lucky; and (b) it's one way, especially later in life, that love is expressed.

There are four siblings and 13 1/2 years between Annie and me. We are almost bookends of the Baby Boom, and, for all practical intents and purposes, the products of different parents. Her parents were young, inexperienced, recovering from a world war and, in my dad's case, the loss of a beloved only sibling. Annie's parents were young and physically vibrant; they were beautiful and they were blessed. They had time, and they were passionately in love.

My parents, those same people, were a lot more experienced, a little less healthy, and so familiar in their love, and so jaded as parents, that they often seemed to me to be on auto-pilot. Which isn't to say they didn't pay attention; it's more that they seemed to wearily anticipate everything, including what I was going to do before I did it, and yet they didn't stand in life's (or my) way. If it wasn't going to kill me, I'd learn from it. If it was going to kill me, they'd see the thought cross my mind and kill the deal without me even realizing it. Mom had recovered from polio; Dad smoked a pack and a half of Chesterfields a day, was plagued by a bad back and heading for quadruple bypass.

Mom smoked, too. I remember car interiors blue with cigarette smoke. The knobbed polyester of my winter jacket collars smelling like nicotine. Dad dumping the butts from the ashtray of the VW bus into the gutter in front of our house.

At that point when it became clear cigarettes were bad for you, Mom had already smoked her way through her pregnancies. She quit cold turkey, and dad took up cigars: the immortal phase of their life was over. They paid attention. They made changes. They had six kids and the world on their shoulders. They were in their mid to late 40's -- exactly where I am now.

They understood mortality in a way they hoped I didn't have to. And I didn't, until today. Today, I lived a day in the life of my oldest sister, a day devoted to a new life -- a flame to keep an older life warm. A day of driving, shopping, waiting, attending, cooking, cleaning, and cuddling a kitten; a day redeemed by the fragile new life that is always emerging somewhere -- so why not here?

"Was I stupid to get this cat?," she asked me. I replied that I thought it's always better to regret having done something than having not done something. This still-nameless, tremulous, terrified, trusting kitten is life itself to Jacques, and even more so to my sister, who noted that said cat, a two-month old Siamese, could be with her until she's 80.

At that point, I'll be 67 or so -- older than she is now. People we love will have died by then (cats, too). We will have become yet more experienced in caring for, perhaps even being cared for by, people we love and whom we hope will still love us. We will be experienced mourners. Our ambitions, should we have them, will be brutally modest.

Or we'll be entirely gone. And if that's the case, we'll leave only love behind; not the kind of love that sets the world on fire, but the kind that changes soiled sheets and clips toenails and adjusts your position in the bed; the kind that puts your wheelchair where you can see the birds and the squirrels; the kind that feeds you like a baby bird.

The kind that's sad and vigilant and inexhaustible. The kind that lasts forever.

--T.A.