Trying To Relate

On being together for the long haul

My in-laws have been married for more than 53 years. They’re visiting from the UK, so I asked them over breakfast this morning what they think makes for a good marriage. 

“I’m going to let her answer that,” my father-in-law said. “That is the secret to a good marriage!”

Exactly twenty years ago, their daughter Emma and I went on our first date. I was thirty-two at the time, just entering my late adolescent phase.

We were each breaking long-held rules we’d made about who we thought we should be with.

I had always said I could never be in a serious relationship with someone who wasn’t from a broken home. Brilliant, I know. But how else would my partner possibly understand me? 

Emma had always held the contrary point: that she could never be serious with someone with divorced parents. She sure hit the reverse jackpot on that one. By our third date, she’d learned that my mom had been married—and divorced—six times. She let this minor detail slide.

What did we know, anyway?

I think of what Emma encountered in those early days. That version of me before therapy and meditation, skittish and prone to shutting down, or going into a tailspin. I was on the run from everything.

“I can’t do this,” I told her a few months in, as we stood in the living room of my Brooklyn apartment.

She actually laughed and sat me down on the futon. 

“You,” she said, “are not going anywhere.”

When our kids were toddlers, they used to want to collect every rock on the beach. They’d fill brightly colored plastic pails to the brim with dull, gray, egg-shaped rocks. There was zero evaluation. If they came across any rock, it was going in the pail. When we tried to remove a single one, they’d wail, and say, “But those are my special rocks.”

I was like this when Emma met me, carrying around a heavy pail of unexamined rocks. Emma kicked my special rock bucket right over. 

Apparently, I learned, people can get super annoyed with each other and not leave. They can argue, even fiercely, and find their way back. This was like learning, at thirty-two, that the Earth is round.

All these rocks were tumbling out at a clip, thanks to her. 

You think deep down, everyone’s selfish? Here, I’ll show you otherwise. 

Everybody leaves? What if we both stay? 

You think you’re hopelessly fucked up? What if I see you differently?

It’s late afternoon now, and Emma and I are on the porch, enjoying the sun. She’s looking out into the yard, smiling a little. There’s a male cardinal hopping around, investigating the grass. I wonder about Emma: How is someone who’s never meditated so serene? There’s so much about her I’ll never know, even this many years in. 

What makes for a good marriage? I have the same answer as my father-in-law:

You’ll have to ask her.

But Emma might say she doesn’t know, either. 

There are all the pat answers like chemistry, and making each other laugh, and just being nice to each other. Of course. But there’s something underlying all that.

I think we get along better by letting go of our fixed ideas about who we are, and what makes a good marriage. Not knowing leaves open so much possibility and hope. Everything is changing, all the time, including us.

I hope I’m half the person she sees in me. I don’t know, but I’m trying. I like learning to be that person for her.

I see her learning to be more vocal about what she needs from me, and others. She’s English, so this doesn’t come naturally to her, but I notice her working on this, growing into it. This makes me happy.

Right now, she’s smiling in the sun, book in her lap, and I tell her the truest thing I can think of, one thing I do know about her for certain.

“You are absolutely adorable.”

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