365 Nights (19 page)

Julia was great at reading body language, verbal cues, and eye movement. Seriously, she should have been a Crush P.I. with all the time she spent as a behavior expert. But I've come to realize that she gave the male gender
way
too much credit and, as a result, I believed that I might have actually had a chance with any number of crushes I developed over the years, which turned out to be just a “Hi, how are ya?” God bless her, she is a very good friend to single women. We should all be so lucky to have a Julia. But now, more than ever, is when I need her help and counsel. Because I feel like dating was the minor leagues. Staying happily married is the big leagues.

Those thrilling feelings of newness, a first-day-of-school anticipation about what might lie ahead, dreaming about how wonderful my life will be when Mr. Terrific and I finally bump into each other, are gone. I've met him, we fell in love, and now we're married. Those luxurious dreams never included bleach sticks, broken garage doors, and sick cats. There seems to be a statute of limitations on new love and you can never recapture the giddy anticipation that comes with it. The cycle runs its course from meeting to falling in love to commitment and then to contentment and to . . . what now?

Giddy anticipation aside, dating for me really did stink; I just remember it with fondness. Much like I remember my freshman year with fondness—without any details—just blurry, slightly out-of -focus recollections. Such as how I smelled like bacon my first semester because my roommate cooked all her food in our dorm room, claiming she “was poisoned by some ham in the dining hall.” To remember dating in Technicolor would require me to remember all the dorky things I did/said/thought while hoping to run into the Right Guy. Like the time I was a full-time employee and went out a few times with a college intern and the whole department found out. In my defense, he was only a few years younger and we were just having fun at the Paul Simon concert in Central Park. Man, I never lived that down.

I do not remember meeting my own husband. Had I written it like the start to a Lifetime movie, it might have happened like this:

“Oh, we met at a Starbucks! He was smitten with the way I ordered my tall, skim, decaf latte.”

“We met at the wine store. He knew me from the gym but thought it was just too cheesy to approach me over there.” (That one's true and he was right.)

“I picked him up on an airplane. He was 6A, and I was 6C, with nobody in 6B.”

“My mother set him up with my sister and then he met me.” (This actually happened to my father's two sisters and it was bad, bad, bad, I tell you, and it
would
make a
great
Lifetime movie.)

But back to the
real
story. We met at work, like so many couples do. I interviewed Brad, took him to lunch, and perhaps even returned him to the airport, where he flew home to DC to a job, an apartment, and a girlfriend. I have no recollection of any of this. (He's reminded me.) I don't even know whether I recommended we hire him or not. However, I do remember that I had good hair at the time, a closet full of amazing designer handbags, and I worked out regularly, so you can see I remember the important things.

For our second meeting (which appeared to me like the first time), it was Brad's first day at the agency. Interestingly, we didn't go to lunch—the first lunch was so dang memorable, why chance it? He seemed nice to me as he got settled into our morning briefing, but sad. You know, kind of quiet and remote. As an off-the-charts extrovert, I don't get quiet, remote people, so I just assume they're sad . . . certainly they're not this way
all the time.

It turned out he
was
sad. He took a job in Charlotte for a clean start from an old life that hadn't worked out. New city, new job, new life. He knew not a soul in Charlotte, but had a sister in South Carolina. He rented a dingy apartment on Albemarle Road because no one counseled him that one should never
ever
rent a dingy apartment on Albemarle Road.

He was overqualified for the job, but he claimed that this new start had presented itself at a key time and he took a risk. I would find out later that he was a quiet and studied risk taker and that most, but not all, of the risks he had taken had worked out quite well to his advantage.

I found out more about him as I took the lead and shopped his tall, eligible self around to my cute, single girlfriends. He worked for the State Department during the first (and much better) Bush administration. He interviewed with the CIA but opted out when they questioned his ability to go for days without sleep and to survive in the wild (he's from Cleveland, after all). He had traveled to a dozen foreign countries, and he enjoyed Aruba much more than Pakistan. He was smart, deliberate, and handsome, and I was not remotely interested in him. I had been through that whole
dating in the workplace
drama once and it had ended as they always do—with lots of tears, painful work meetings, and us doing “rock, scissors, paper” to see who would look for another job. Since I worked there first, we didn't really “rock, scissors, paper” for it; he left for St. Louis and I swore off dating guys from work. Once bitten, twice smart, or so I thought.

Vowing not to get burned again, I had adopted Brad as a project. I had some fun girlfriends, an active social life, and a desire to “help.” I set him up with friends, I took him along to the Pub, I invited him to sporting events, I offered some fashion advice (he was from Cleveland, after all), and I gave him obnoxiously detailed updates on my love life with the hope that he might give some advice on the opposite sex.

Brad indulged me in hearing about my neurotic immature Crushes and mind-numbingly boring tirades about whether the Crush du Jour would call. And I made sure he got on the invite list for some great parties, and strongly counseled him against wearing high-top basketball shoes without socks. It was more than a fair trade-off, I'd say.

Brad helped me move into my first house. Brad helped me with a particularly challenging work colleague (code for she was a heinous witch and I wanted to claw out her eyeballs every time we passed in the hallway). Brad coached me through some more lame Crushes. And on his own time, he made his own friends, nabbed his own invitations to some great parties, trained for a marathon, and blossomed into this incredibly interesting person. My friend Christy contended that he was this incredibly interesting person all along, but that I had my head too far up my rear end to notice. So true, Christy, so true.

Brad and I started dating soon after that chat with Christy and when I realized there was another girl that could be in the picture. She worked with us, too, and she played golf . . . a guy's dream girl! She was paralyzingly timid, so my extroversion played out well for me. Brad and I were at the Pub and I hinted that if he ever were inclined to ask me out, I would be inclined to say yes. He did and I did—he told me had been waiting patiently for the right moment.

As I wave my fan back and forth to cool my heated brow just thinking about those heated dating days, I wonder, does a woman's sexual history have an impact on her sex life once she's married?

I have a friend who has only ever
“been”
with one guy her whole life, and that is her husband. They have a pretty decent sex life with typical highs and lows. However, I secretly speculate whether she has a sense of regret that she didn't experiment more when she was younger. And then on the other extreme, there are women who would have sex at the drop of a hat when they were dating. Now married, they couldn't be less interested in sex. Why don't they want to have sex with the one person who vowed to love them forever? Perhaps for them, and for other highly sexed daters, it was all part of the chase and dating ritual—once you land a husband, you no longer need that tool. Sex was part of the mating ritual, not part of the marriage ritual. It's amazing how sex before marriage can complicate and lend drama to everyday life, good and bad. Contrast that with sex inside marriage, and if it's going well, it can simplify life, and give you a clear vision of what's going on in your relationship. That's not to say that sex outside marriage is horrible—it can be sexy, and romantic and fun, but it can also cause people to feel lonely and ashamed, and adrift.

As the mother of a young girl, I often worry about how you can convey the complexities of these problems. I know it's incredibly naïve to think we can shield our daughters from embarking on a sexual career too early, but I wish we could. It's not that I'm opposed to sex. Heck, I've been having a ton of it lately and I've become a real fan—again. And it's not that I'm unaware of the whole hormone thing and how intensely distracting it can be and how the abstinence pledges are really laughable. But for me, it's become screamingly clear that married sex is fundamentally different—and better.

Many a theologian supports the idea that sex and spirituality go hand in hand when you're married, and strangely enough, my Women's Bible Study Group helped my married sex life. I joined this group of neighborhood women several years ago for weekly study sessions. I marveled at the tenacity, smarts, and faith of this group and learned far more than I ever hoped about my faith, my marriage, my relationships, and my life. We've never discussed sex per se, and I'm sure some of the members might blush at the idea that this group of women was the impetus for my embarking on this journey of intimacy. We discuss many of the things that experts tell us are important to marriage—intention, priority, spirituality, forgiveness, and kindness.

My three years with this group of women forced me to dig deeply into what God wants for my life. It was humbling and difficult. But one thing I realized was that part of having a strong marriage meant it was firing on
all
cylinders, and that meant having intimate, deliberate, and meaningful relations with Brad—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It made me realize that my marriage fuels most everything—our family, our social life, and the overall health and success of our home. I love the idea that for those who practice Judaism, the home is the most sacred place of all—not the temple, not a holy site, but the home. And if you treat the home, and your relationship with the people in it, with the same respect that you would a church or a temple, it would be incredibly difficult to ignore or to overlook them.

So with the thought in mind that the home can and should be a sacred place, it is also a place where the mundane life of marriage happens, too. Sundays are my favorite days to hang out with Brad—spiritually a day of rest. We read the papers together, swap sections, and read articles aloud to each other. We go to lunch after church and then veg out. Most always we have my brother and his family over for Sunday dinner, and we're running around outside playing kick ball or hunkering down in front of a movie. Sundays are generally good days—as a family and a couple.

But all days are not idyllic, and many pass where life is a blur of annoying errands and tasks to do. Simple things can get overlooked, and you'd be amazed at how easy it is to go through your day without really noticing the person with whom you're scheduled to spend the rest of your life. Granted, some people intentionally ignore their spouse but others, like me, simply fall out of touch with them quite by accident.

Days are spent as a tag team—meeting the sitter, picking up and dropping off kids, running into the store, picking up dry cleaning. The logistics of today's family are ridiculous—between activities, school, sports, church/synagogue, the house, and so on, it's easy to live a life of coming and going.

I may be overstating the obvious, but daily intimacy with Brad requires me to
notice him
. It regularly prompts me to look him in the eyes and connect in ways—both physical and emotional—that are easily overlooked in the day-to-day machinations of life. Now I have to address him up close and personal, instead of hollering down the hall for him not to forget today is recycling day. Now I physically touch my husband in a different way instead of handing him a dressed child and telling him not to forget the backpack and lunch. And when we're intimate, we are in the moment, and I'm not discussing day-to-day life, because I've learned that multitasking doesn't work in the bedroom. Instead, we're chatting and connecting—you know, couple stuff, the stuff that makes me smile and giggle and feel good about my decision to throw caution to the wind and do it every day. We hug more, we smooch more, we connect more. Because without all the hugging, smooching, cuddling, and yes, sex, it's easy to become a brother and sister act, or a couple of good friends getting together as a family. Brad said to me one day, “You can't have an intimate emotional connection without an intimate physical connection. If you don't connect physically—even if it's just a hug or a kiss—in some way every day, you're just good friends who are raising kids together. And I could probably do that with a lot of people.”

Regular intimacy with my husband meant that not every sentence coming out of my mouth started with “could you do [fill in the blank here].” It was a subtle shift, but an important one. And it made me wonder—had I been an accidental poser all these years? Pretending to be in a wonderful and committed marriage that wasn't really all that wonderful as I wasn't committed to regular intimacy with my spouse? I was vowing to fix that now. Which was funny, because unlike my mother, I'm not that handy around the house.