365 Nights (27 page)

Brad and I got engaged in the mountains. The elevated backdrop made up for the proposal—which was borderline pitiful. For some reason, all of Brad's experience in high school drama failed him and he simply froze. We were at a quaint bed-and-breakfast and we both knew it was coming (please, don't most women know when the proposal is coming?), but he literally couldn't get out the words. I guess it's sweet and a bit romantic when the love of your life says, “Uh, so you wanna get married?” while blushing a bright crimson color. No words about how this last year has been the most wonderful one of his life. No sentiments about our incredible future together. No mention of his dreams to have a family with me. No love notions about how incredibly fantastic and special I am. Just “Uh, so you wanna get married?” Well, the man has always been a straight shooter and indeed I did want to get married. We drank an entire bottle of champagne and I called my mother, who squealed with delight and set the entire wedding machine in motion that very second.

This year, another wedding announcement and invitation made their way through the family. While I vaguely thought that the whole of my generation had gotten married, in came the announcement that my first cousin was going to get hitched.

I adore my first cousin—she's young, smart, and vibrant and will make her very nice groom a terrific wife. My mom and I went to her wedding with my kids, and made a short weekend out of it. My brother and dad had long-standing plans and couldn't attend the wedding, so I gave Brad a pass on having to go, which he grabbed like a starving cat. It's funny—women love weddings and men just don't. In fact, my dad has been known to conveniently skip the actual wedding and strategically show up at the reception. When people comment on the ceremony, he nods along knowingly. “I know! Wasn't the music wonderful?” he chimes in as he heads to the buffet table. For men, weddings are boring unless it's a family member or best friend and even then the wedding is still boring, but there is an open bar to offset the serious stuff.

My cousin walked down the aisle, and I cried. I cry even if I'm sitting on the groom's side in the way back and I don't know the bride from Eve. I cry at how beautiful she looks. Even if she doesn't look
that
beautiful (and let's face it, some don't), she probably looks as good as she'll ever look. And I assume that she'll never look that wonderful again, so I cry a little tear of regret on her behalf. I cry as the music swells and the soloist crescendos and I think that this will be the last time this woman will ever, ever be the center of attention, and that the rest of her life will be spent negotiating happiness with another person. And I cry another little tear of regret on her behalf. (I hope someone did for me.) Then I cry at the sight of her dad walking her down the aisle and the overwhelming mix of emotions he must have. And I hope that the groom exceeds all that her dad wishes for her and I cry another tear, of regret, because I know somewhere along the way someone is going to be disappointed. And I cry, because as beautiful as she looks and as happy as she appears, she has no idea what's ahead. If she did, she might be crying along with me.

Instead, my cousin looked marvelously happy. After the ceremony, we walked from the church to the reception at a nearby museum. At that point, my cousin tucked a hot pink Gerbera daisy into her pretty chignon, and danced the night away in her bare feet. As my mother wrangled my children out onto the dance floor, I mused about just how long these sweet newlyweds would enjoy each other. I hoped it would be for a long, long time.

We all bring our “stuff” to marriage, and growing up in the seventies and eighties was not without its challenges. The feminist movement was gaining momentum and many of my childhood notions of marriage and relationships were changing at breakneck speed. Barbie and Cinderella were still around, but Barbie was a doctor now, and Cinderella could march on Washington. Women were pursuing careers dressed in ugly imitations of men's business attire—dark, masculine suits and floppy bow scarves.

I was encouraged to be a successful businessperson, and achieve high marks in every part of my life academically (which I did, on occasion). And while it was expected that I would marry—and marry well, whatever the heck that meant—I was not offered such stewardship in that area.

My father issued me one rule: If I got married before I turned twenty-seven, he would not pay for the wedding. It was a gift, really. First of all, I felt off the hook in a way. I graduated from college, moved to New York, and never gave a thought to having a boyfriend or finding one. I did not have a boyfriend or find one in college or in New York, but I did have a ball and never felt any pressure to seriously date, much less settle down. A regular date now and then would have been nice, but overall I was able to experience a bit of independence and a life on my own. That was a good thing. And while my parents were secretly terrified that I would meet someone in New York and stay there forever, perhaps they knew that I needed a bit of seasoning before I could make a mature decision about whom to marry.

So for me, getting married early was not in the cards, through fate or choice, and Brad and I married when I was thirty-one. I do know four people who married early, to their high school sweethearts—my mother, my mother-in-law, my cousin Jenn, and my college roommate Diane. For everyone else, I shudder to think about the trajectory of their lives, including mine, if they married their first love so young. I was a late bloomer, and late bloomers should never marry a high school sweetheart because they still have some finishing up to do. If you want a depressing twist on
It's a Wonderful Life
(which is already depressing, if you ask me), imagine your life if you had married your high school sweetheart. If I had married Alex, and I really thought I would, who knows how crazy and miserable I might be and he certainly would be. So I am always intrigued when people marry their high school or college sweethearts and it works out because you're making really, really important decisions and you're still really, really young. How do they do that?

So as I matured (ever so slowly, like those plants that only bloom every seven years or so), I started working on the list of qualities I must have in a mate. Women do this whether or not we admit it, and hopefully the list grows and matures as we do. For example, my list from my twenties included stupid mandatories like must be “a scratch golfer” and “from the South.” I thought these two traits were extremely important. Go figure. People might scoff at the list but, remember, often your mate is only as good as the requirements you put on it.

I remember a dear friend of mine calling me in tears one day. This was during Marriage No. 1, and her first husband was on her case about her weight. “He says he's not attracted to me now that I've gained a little weight,” she sobbed into the phone. This is a good time to mention that this friend of mine is a knockout and she and Hubby No. 1 met at the gym where they both worked. Hubby No. 1 was a nice enough guy, I guess. But I think the most important thing he had going for him was that he was smoking hot. “I can't believe he married me for my looks!” she wailed into the phone. “Sweetie, tell me this—why did you marry him?” I wanted to add, “It wasn't because he was a brain surgeon, now was it?” But I didn't. She had married Hubby No. 1 for many of the same reasons he had married her, I suppose. And yes, she loved him and all that stuff, too. But she had made a list, and then she outgrew her list, and once she realized it, it was too late.

Even though I had purged my list of some of the shallower requisites and updated it with more substantial ones, Brad still didn't fit the mold. Sure, he wasn't from the South and wasn't a scratch golfer, but he also came from divorced parents, went to a college I had never heard of, wasn't bust-a-gut funny, wasn't short and stocky, and so on. Why did Brad measure up? He fit a mold I hadn't tried before—decent, smart, loving, kind, interesting, and incredibly devoted to me. Yes, that last one was a new one.

We choose men for lots of the same reasons they choose us— attractiveness and attraction, employment, family background, faith, religion. But intimacy compatibility? Well, that's generally present in spades at the beginning and it never occurred to me that could change. It is difficult to imagine ourselves twenty years from now, married with kids, a job, a house, and a very mediocre sex life. In fact, it is difficult to imagine all the bumps in the road ahead of a married couple that could affect our sex lives: illness, unemployment, stress, infertility, fertility, financial woes, infidelity, success, aging. Let's face it: We never know what life is going to throw at us, and all and more of these issues can knock a relationship sideways, and spin intimacy completely out of the consideration set.

Most of us don't know any of this, we get married anyway, and we enter the covenant of marriage with unlikely expectations. Whether your parents were married or divorced, it seems many of us are woefully unprepared for all that is demanded, expected, and negotiated in marriage. It is an unwieldy lifelong assignment, and it brings out the absolute best and worst in us all. Premarital counseling seems like a noble endeavor, and many churches and synagogues and other places of worship require that you attend some sort of workshop in order to get married there. But there have been times when I thought that psychic counseling may have provided greater value.

Brad and I had premarital counseling that consisted of, among many things, taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which I really advise against, especially if the invitations have already gone out. I mean, when you find out that you and your future spouse could not be more incompatible, isn't it a tad too late already? That wasn't entirely the case for us, but I did find out that I am an extrovert and Brad is an introvert. The important insight we got out of those tests is that we “recharge differently.” Apparently, being around him (and other people) recharges me, while Brad needs to recharge . . . without me.

Were we discouraged from getting married? Of course not. We had momentum on our side—the whole wedding thing had taken on a life of its own. That wedding was
happening
, just ask my mother. And we were so darn in love that we wouldn't let any differences get in the way of us getting married—we could work through them, gosh darn it. Rather, they should really have done a sexual compatibility test. Brad will want sex and will resent having to ask for it. I will not want to have sex after two babies and fifty-hour workweeks and will resent having to have it. Now, talk among yourselves . . .

So instead, I would like to suggest Marriage Internships. Unlike living together before you get married (which I still think is a shaky idea despite my feminist views about many things, because it lacks permanence), you and your fiancé live with another couple. Preferably in a small house, modestly furnished with young kids. It's kind of like auditing a class. You spend day in and day out observing this couple navigate jobs, house, babies, cleaning, social lives, and each other. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's just life. It's a hard, close-up dose of reality. If after that you're still smitten with your partner and the idea of marriage, then give it go.

I asked my mom once what was her secret to her long and happy marriage. She glibly replied that she had picked the right guy. Well, how did you know? I probed. “I don't know, sweetie, I loved him. Plenty of my friends thought they had a good one, too, but it was the wrong one.” Luck of the draw, God's hand, call it what you want, but she was grateful for it. Brad's parents were also high school sweethearts and they divorced when he was ten, so who's to say?

Back then, people tended to stick close to home and marry young. That way, you didn't know much about the great big world you were missing when you married
Most Likely to Succeed
, who became
Drinks Too Much and Can't Hold Down a Job
. In some ways, is life better if you don't know how many choices eluded you?

Nowadays, you go away to camp, you travel every summer, you go to college, you travel abroad, you have different internships in different cities, you have several different jobs, again in several different cities. You have global friends, global experiences, and a global love life. You are exposed to so much, how in the world can you narrow your options and choose the one person with whom you'll spend the rest of you life? It's simply too much. Choices can kill the ability to make basic and rational choices that won't later haunt you till your dying days.

My friend Cindy thinks there are too many choices available to us all and research says she's right. Apparently, Wal-Mart can be bad for us as we spend exponentially more hours making low-impact decisions because there are too many choices. Frivolous choices that don't necessarily enhance or change our lives. Sunscreen. Baby wipes. Shampoo. And the potato chip aisle? Forget it. Anyone remember the Charlie Chip Man? He rode around in a Charles Chip postal truck painted yellow and brown and delivered a tin of chips to your house—plain, BBQ, and sour cream and onion. Surely one would fit the bill, and if it didn't, we were better off anyway.

For some of us, life narrows our options. And maybe that's not so bad. All the options could give us ulcers. But my dad is a big believer in options. He's made a career out of developing, honing, and creating options for himself and for our family. Networking, building, and planning what will come next. The man could teach a master class on
options.

When applying to college, you want to have options, he told me. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, and you will always have options. When you're looking for a job, leave yourself some options. When you're in a job, stay focused and work hard. But remember, you always have options. Options are a reward of sorts. Hard work, smart decisions, and commitment yield choices. And having choices means you're not stuck. Stuck in a job, stuck in a place, or stuck in a rut. Choices are a good thing. But how about stuck in marriage? Getting married is antithetical to options. Marriage means you've made a choice and you've decided there are no better options. But despite the fact that marriage and options don't really jibe, my dad was still a fan of the institution.