Recipes for a Perfect Marriage
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Authors: Kate Kerrigan
About
Recipes for a Perfect Marriage
In memory of Hugh and Ann Nolan
~
With love to my husband, Niall
True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.
The Road Less Traveled
by M. Scott Peck
About
Recipes for a Perfect Marriage
An Invitation from the Publisher
The heart of a recipe, what makes it work, is a mystery. Taste is such a personal thing and yet the right recipe can open a person’s mind to a food they thought they didn’t like. Then again, you can put all the right ingredients together, follow the instructions exactly, and still have a disaster on your hands.
That’s how it has always been with me and my Grandma Bernadine’s brown bread. I would do exactly as she showed me, but it would always come out a little too crumbly or doughy or hard.
“You’re too fussy,” she’d say. “Put some jam on and just eat it anyway. It’ll be different again tomorrow.”
And it was always different. But it was never right.
Like my marriage to Dan.
*
They say you just
know
the man you are going to marry. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You date guys, sleep with them, live with them—get through your twenties having fun falling in and out of love. Then one day you meet this man and you just know he is “The One.” He’s different from everyone else you have ever met. You feel happier, more special, more alive when you are with him. So you get married.
For two weeks you are Barbie and Ken. There’s a big show-off wedding at the Plaza, and you wear a white meringue of a dress even though you are over thirty. You spend what should be the down payment for your first home on fourteen days in the Caribbean.
Then, when you get your “Ken” home, you realize he was an impulse buy. You wanted the “married” label so badly that you didn’t think it through, and now he doesn’t look as good as he did under the spangly lights of singledom. He doesn’t fit you properly, either; although you convinced yourself he’d be suitable for everyday use, you now find him uncomfortable and irritating. He has cost you your freedom; he is the most expensive mistake you will ever make. You have been married for less than three months and everything he does and everything he says makes you scream inside:
For the rest of my life! I can’t live with this for the rest of my life!
But you don’t say it out loud because you are ashamed of having made such a terrible, terrible mistake. Even though you despise him for the way he clips his toenails in bed, you know it is not grounds for divorce. You know that this silent torture you are living with is entirely your fault for marrying him when you didn’t really love him. Not enough, certainly. Now that you think back on it, did you ever love him at all, or was it all just about you desperately wanting to get married? Because surely love is too strong to allow these petty everyday annoyances to turn it into hatred. Love is bigger than that. Love doesn’t make mistakes. Not real love. Not the kind of love that makes you marry someone.
*
By the seventh week of married life the statistic that one in four marriages ends in divorce cheers you, and you have decided that six months is a respectable amount of time to be seen trying to make it work.
Except that you know you haven’t. Tried, that is. And you can’t help thinking that perhaps you are just part of a generation of women who finds marriage a challenging and difficult state of being.
Or perhaps there is no universal group, no zeitgeist-y cliché to hide behind.
In which case I am just a woman who married the wrong guy and is trying to find a way out.
It either works or it doesn’t work.
Gooseberry Jam
Jam, in itself, is not difficult to make. But the quality of the fruit is important, and key to the quality is when you pick it. Fruit contains its own thickening agent, pectin, which is only present in the fruit when it is just ripe. Too early and the fruit will thicken but there isn’t enough sugar to make it sweet; too late and the fruit will be sweet, but the jam runny and weak.
Gooseberries are ideal because they grow wild and in abundance in this part of Ireland. Add 4lbs sugar to 3lbs gooseberries and boil them hard in a metal pot with one pint of water for a matter of minutes. It is important not to turn the heat down; the fruit must keep boiling throughout the process, otherwise the jam will be no good. To check if the jam is ready, decant a spoonful onto a cold plate. As it starts to cool, gently push with a spoon to one side. If it wrinkles on the top, it is ready. Put into a jar sterilized with boiling water and seal immediately.
Manhattan, New York, 2004
Jam is so simple to make—just fruit, sugar, and water—yet the success of it hinges on chemistry, which is quite tricky to control. The jam has to be heated to a ferocious boil, then kept there for just the right amount of time, until it is ready to gel.
If the heat is not right to start with, the thickening process will never kick off. If it overboils, the jam becomes cloying and too thick. And sometimes you can have the best quality ingredients, apply just the right amount of heat, and, for some reason, the chemistry just never kicks in at all.
Sound familiar?
Dan is an ordinary guy. I don’t mean that badly; being an ordinary guy is a good thing. What I really mean is that he is ordinary to me, and that is the problem.
Was I ever in love with him? I just don’t know anymore. I made the ultimate declaration of love on our wedding day and somehow, in the hugeness of the gesture, I lost the clarity of what love was. Lost faith in the feeling that made me say “yes” to him in the first place.
Dan is great. Really. Just not for me.
I met him about a year and a half ago (if I loved him, I would be able to remember exactly when), although I guess, in a weird way, he had been knocking about on the edge of my life before then. He was the superintendent in my apartment building. “Don’t sleep with your building super!” I hear you cry. Basic rule of being a single woman in Manhattan. If things don’t work out and your water pipe bursts, who are you going to call? You stay friendly with the super, you flirt with him when you have to, and you tip him at Christmas. It is one relationship you
don’t
mess with.
Unless you are so sad and desperate that you are afraid of turning into one of life’s conspicuously lonely: the lingering huggers, the abandoned wives who book a lot of aromatherapy and have begun to actively crave a human touch.
The New York singles scene was tough.
There were the players: high maintenance, competitive husband-hunters; manicured, buffed, styled-up peak-performers. Then there were the rest of us just bumbling through the bars, forgetting to change out of our work shoes, borrowing a friend’s lipstick as an afterthought, knowing that we were never going to meet a man if we didn’t start making an effort. All of us were trying to look as if we didn’t care, pretending that what really mattered to us was our friends. Maybe I’m cynical, but behind the glimmering cosmetics and the carefully poised insouciance, I always saw just a lot of brave faces. In the eyes of my closest girlfriends, I knew that, ultimately, I was just an emotional stand-in for the man they hadn’t met yet. We were co-commentators in one another’s lives, important to one another’s emotional survival, but not integral. Men, marriage, children; as we buffed and polished and shone through our thirties, this life cycle was turning from a birthright to a dream.
