The Longest Date: Life as a Wife (3 page)

The two ancient witnesses looked at each other, which was the first and only indication that they spoke English.

“I think that’s sick,” the rabbi said flatly.

“It’s not sick,” I said. “They’re very happy.”

Then, in a terribly unoriginal attempt at a joke, the rabbi said, “Which one is the man?”

“They’re both men,” I said. “They’re both very good men.”

When my ex-husband came back into the room, I felt ill. I had flown cross-country, paid five hundred dollars, and dragged him to a warehouse so some Rent-a-Rabbi and his Manischewitz drinking buddies could sit in judgment of him. And the irony was, he was the practicing Jew, not I. I was fuming, wondering if we should forget the get, get out, get while the gettin’ was good. I was composing an angry letter in my head, venting to the hot rabbi, praying this wasn’t representative of my faith, when we were informed that our document was complete. Then we were asked to stand. And face each other. And then my ex-husband was asked to look into my eyes and repeat some phrases that meant basically “With this document, I release you.”

And as we stood there, just as we had on our wedding day, he looked even more handsome. And grown-up. And happy. And I thought about why he had married me in the first place. Yes, he loved me, but also, he was probably afraid he would never be able to have a family if he didn’t marry a woman. And now he had that family without having had to compromise any part of who he was. And I thought about what he had given me all of those years ago when he had unofficially released me. He gave me my single life back. And as much as I hated the heartbreak and longing, it became the basis of my writing career, which led me to a job on
Sex and the City
, which led me to New York, which led me to my tattooed lawyer/poet/chef.

And then I thought about how this tribunal, this ridiculous judgmental tribunal, was what my ex-husband faced every day, sometimes when he least expected it, sometimes from family, sometimes from within, and realized how hard it must have been for him to overcome that judgment in order to be honest with me and with himself. So, as he dropped the get into my open palms, which made it legally binding, I felt proud of him, and proud of us, for releasing each other to our proper destinies.

“I’m happy you’re getting married,” he said. “Now I can finally stop feeling guilty.”

I told him he had no reason to feel guilty. But he said he couldn’t help it.

Some things, I guess, we’re just born with.

A
few years ago I was at a friend’s wedding and I remember thinking, during the vows, what an important test it was: To be able to say, out loud, in front of your closest friends and family, why you were choosing to spend your life with this particular person. Why you loved this person. Why, of all the people in the world,
this
person. It really struck me . . . how enormous an admission that was, how I hoped I would be able to do that someday, and how I needed to break up with the guy I had brought to that wedding.

In the years that followed, that became my test of a relationship: could I answer those questions about whom I loved and why I loved him openly and honestly in front of all the people I cared about?

And here we are. And I can. And there is so much to say. It is such a relief to have so much to say (and not just to my therapist):

One thing I love about you, Ian, is that we have said most of these things to each other already. You never let a day go by when you don’t tell me how much you love me. And this is, of course, after warning me early on that you didn’t want to say “I love you” too often, because you felt it would lose its meaning. I love that you have no strength in your convictions when it comes to the limits of your love. You continue to surprise me, and yourself, I think, with your capacity to love and be loved.

I love that I can count on you completely. You always do more than you say you will. In fact, when I recently had a little health scare (which turned out to be nothing), your response was, “Not on my watch. Nothing is going to happen to you on
my
watch.” And although you sometimes seem to have superpowers, I know you can’t stop bad things from happening to us or to the people around us. But the way you reacted and dropped everything to take care of me made me feel confident that we’ll be able to get through anything. You make me feel safe, and watched over, like nobody ever has before.

In fact, there is only one promise you have not kept, and it was one you made when we first met. You said I shouldn’t date you, because you would break my heart. I believe my response was: “How do you know I won’t break
your
heart?” And the game was on. And we both failed miserably, as evidenced by this rather public waving of the white flag.

I love how much you love your family and friends, and what a good friend you are, and what good friends you surround yourself with. I feel confident you would have realized on your own what a catch I was, but I still credit your friend Christina for punching you, fairly hard, after she met me, and telling you not to screw this up. And although you definitely have a mind of your own, I know that a veto from any one of a number of people here might have meant no party tonight. Well, you would have been at some party tonight, but not this party.

And I have to thank my friends, too, for ignoring my plea not to let me fall in love with you after you warned me I shouldn’t. I remember when Liz and Elisa and Julie met you: they told me the next morning they liked us together, and they were off the case. Apparently nobody could stop this wedding from happening, not even our friends who could normally be counted on for anything.

I love what a good neighbor you are. I never had a neighbor who brought me pumpkin soufflé or green apple sorbet. I can’t complain, though, because I have a boyfriend who does. A boyfriend who, even when I’m doing the lemonade fast, tells me I don’t need to, then tries to make even
not eating
fun by buying a Darth Vader bendy straw, and making lemonade popsicles with ice trays and toothpicks. Of course, this generosity comes with a price. Gone forever are the days when I could, like a good New Yorker, go into my house, or walk down the street, without talking to anyone. You make friends at the shoe repair store and J&R. You know every dog that walks down our lane by name. Even those two identical dogs: you remember which one is the nice one. Which brings me to another point. You do not judge based on appearances. You are not a snob. I love that you are as impressed by a good cheese maker as you are by Sir Elton John.

Speaking of cheese, I was thinking about that first night you cooked for me, which included the first of many cheese lectures. You like to say that’s how you wooed me, but that’s not exactly what happened. What happened was that it was very early in our relationship. In fact, we weren’t “a relationship.” We were, at best, an extended booty call (and sometimes I went to your place when you were drunk instead of you showing up at mine, so we weren’t even doing a booty call right), which is why I almost canceled our dinner plans that night. I was feeling tired and not in a great mood and I didn’t feel like dressing up or putting on makeup and I knew we didn’t have the kind of relationship where I could just come over and be myself, and I felt certain we never would, and I was thinking maybe I’d never have that, and I think I said pretty much all of that when I called to cancel. And I remember you replied, “You’re a freak, but okay.”

And then we hung up. And I sat there wondering if I
was
a freak, which had never really occurred to me before. So I decided to go over, no makeup, not in a great mood, and as soon as I arrived I saw you had all the ingredients you’d bought at the farmers’ market on the table: the raw-milk white cheddar, the dried mushrooms reconstituting or whatever they do, and everything chopped and ready. And I’d had men cook for me before—you know, the one pasta dish they know how to make to impress a date—but this was different. You knew what you were doing, and you could do it in the tiniest of New York kitchens, and I never would have figured you for such a chef, and we had a lovely night.

And I think now about how many of those nights we’ve had since, and how there is nobody I would rather talk to when I am feeling less than, nobody I would rather come home to after a hard day, and how wrong I was about you and us and what we could become. And unlike most people, I love being wrong. I love thinking I know the ending and then being surprised.

I love that you pass all of the relationship tests I formulated while I was waiting to meet someone, like that you love in me what I love in myself, that you make me the best version of me, that we both think we got a great deal.

I love that you are supersmart and witty and funny and sexy, and a gifted storyteller and a crazy-good improvisational poet, and a great lawyer who cares about all the right things, including words. I love that we can agree to disagree about some issues, like the comma before the “and.”

I love that once you decided we were in for the long haul, you never wavered. You never threatened to leave or used your love as leverage, as I did once or twice in a weak moment. It should be apparent to you now that I was bluffing. But you always made it clear that we were staying together, and that we had no choice but to work things out, which is an amazing quality, and one I know will serve us well throughout our lives. You basically removed the eject button.

And I love that you never let us go to bed angry. I always thought that was sort of a suggestion, but you take it very seriously, and we are better for it. I love that you hold me all night every night, and that you pull me close as soon as you wake up, and that your kiss still makes my knees weak like it did the first night we met.

I love what an adventure I know our life will continue to be. I was always worried that getting married would mean getting boring, but one thing I know is that life with you will never be boring. You always want to do more, learn more, and see more, as evidenced by the fact that last weekend, when any other couple would be putting the finishing touches on their wedding plans, we were in the pool at John Jay College getting our scuba diving certificates. And maybe it was all those years on
Sex and the City
, but I couldn’t help but wonder . . . wouldn’t it be nice to have a buddy system in life, and maybe that’s what marriage is?

I remember worrying, when I first moved to New York, that something could happen to me and nobody would know. But now I have you, the ultimate buddy. And it makes me ridiculously, politically incorrectly happy to know you’re on my team, rooting for me, watching out for me, and that you’ll help me if ever there’s a crisis, even though at John Jay College you swam to the surface before I got my regulator back in my mouth and my mask cleared. And even though you’ve been laughing all week about how I got to the surface and said (mask squashing my nose): “You’re supposed to be my buddy!” Despite that lapse, I know I can count on you . . . to lose credit cards and keys but never lose sight of what’s important.

I know you will be an amazing husband because you have been an amazing boyfriend and an amazing fiancé, and if all goes well, I know you will be an amazing father.

This is why you, Ian Michael Wallach, out of all the people in the world, are the man I want to spend my life with. I love you truly, madly, deeply. I love you for crying during the happy and sad scenes in movies and in life. I love you for loving me as well as you do, and for proposing in such a romantic and bold way to set the tone for this romantic and bold wedding, and a romantic and bold future.

I love you for never being halfhearted about anything, and for taking this giant step with me, and for making it easy to say out loud, in front of my closest friends and family, how much and why I love you.

A
good man is not so hard to find. I’ve dated a bunch of them. They call when they say they’re going to call, they take you out on actual dates, they tell their friends and even their parents about you, they like their parents, they play their phone messages in front of you, they have just one glass of wine with dinner because they’re driving, they have jobs, they have female friends they haven’t slept with . . . yeah, yeah, whatever. The point is they’re not hard to find. Bad boys are hard to find, because they’re never where they’re supposed to be. In fact, they’re not supposed to be anywhere. They do as they please. They go where the wind takes them. If you’re lucky, you might get a cell phone number, so you never know exactly what (or who) a bad boy is doing. It’s infuriating and insensitive and intriguing and insane and oh, how we love bad boys.

You know you’re dating a bad boy when you’re not sure you’re actually dating. Bad boys are usually one of two things: unavailable or undressed. This leaves you unable to think of anything but where the hell is he and when will he do that to me again? Bad boys are rule breakers and heartbreakers and bed shakers and oh, how we love bad boys.

A bad boy will call you “baby,” probably because he forgot your name, but still, there’s nothing sexier than a bad boy who’s dying to see you, baby. It doesn’t matter if anything he says is true. It sounds good, and it feels good, because, baby, bad boys have throw down.

Bad boys are not tentative about kissing. They are not tentative about anything. They know what they want and they go for it, which is thrilling when it’s you, and not so thrilling when it’s suddenly the model (not) eating at the table next to yours. Of course, that rarely happens, because bad boys rarely take you out. They don’t have to. The bar is low for bad boys. They don’t have to surprise you with flowers; it’s a surprise they show up at all. In fact, a bad boy is happy to let a good guy take you to dinner, ask you about you, kiss you good night at the door—a bad boy knows he can call at midnight and still get invited over for dessert.

Bad boys are dessert. They’re like hot fudge sundaes. You know they’re not good for you. You know that, as a woman, at a certain age, you’re not supposed to indulge anymore, but that doesn’t mean you won’t fantasize about it while you’re eating your mixed berries.

The other fantasy, of course, is that you will somehow reform a bad boy. That you will meet one with a motorcycle and tattoos and a love of bars, and he’ll tell you he’s trouble, but clearly that’s all a front. In truth, he’s just wounded, as we all are, and eventually he’ll fall madly in love with you because you are what is missing in his life.

Okay, I admit it. I recently married a bad boy. The thing is, bad boys are so elusive, so aware of their options (her, her, and her), so impossible to pin down, when one gives you a ring, it means something. That you should hire a very old nanny. Oh, oh, oh, how we love bad boys.

•   •   •

I wrote that ode to bad boys for
People
magazine’s 2005 Sexiest Man Alive issue. That year, the year Ian and I got married, the editors divided their sexy men into three categories: Smart Guys, Funny Guys, and Bad Boys, and Ian took it as the highest compliment that I included him (at least literarily) in the same category as Lenny Kravitz, Russell Crowe, and Colin Farrell.

To this day I’m still not sure if it was a compliment or a cry for help. Ian was definitely more of a bad boy than I had ever dated, but rather than run the other way, I married him.

People—not
People
magazine, but people in general—tend to think I’m overstating this bad-boy thing when they meet Ian, mostly because he seems very happily in love with me, and he now has a Vespa instead of a motorcycle. But don’t let that fool you. There are ramifications when you marry a bad boy, and here is one of them: most of the women a bad boy introduces you to, he has slept with. (That’s why you might make a phone call instead of small talk when he introduces you to an exotic beauty outside of Canal Jeans.) It seems like we’re always in danger of running into someone Ian slept with, usually when I’m looking my worst. After a long international flight, on the shuttle bus to the parking lot, Ian will say, “Oh my God, Cookie?!” (yes, her real name), and then from what they say—or don’t say—about how they know each other, I can tell she’s someone he slept with before we met.

Incidentally, we are still friends with Cookie and many other Cookies from Ian’s past. But for some reason, I like to know—I
need
to know—if these women had sex with my husband.

It would probably be healthier not to know, not to keep this tally in my head. He married me, after all. But knowing makes me feel like these ghosts of his sexual past do not have the upper hand. He does not share a secret with them. He shares their secret with me.

I leave it to you to figure out if that makes me highly evolved or highly masochistic, but I will say that this is a hell of my own making, because Ian is not, by nature, a kiss-and-teller. He never points out that a woman is someone he slept with (maybe because, at some point, I should just assume), but if I ask him about it later, he always answers honestly, usually positively and dismissively:

“Once, when I was in high school.”

“We were working together.”

“The bride doesn’t count.” (I’d asked if there would be anyone he’d slept with at a wedding we were attending.)

“I was living in Paris.”

“She was angry with her husband.”

Or my personal favorite: “I never slept with Twinkie [not her real name]. But I once held my ex while Twinkie went down on her, because my ex always had kind of a lesbian fantasy of that.”

That last one caught me off guard (as I’m sure it just did my parents, Twinkie, and Ian’s ex, if they are reading this), and it was probably an indication that I should stop asking questions I might not want to know the answer to. That rule is a good one in court and in marriage. In fact, I’m still recovering from that particular answer. I am sorry for asking, sorry for knowing, sorry you have to know, and sorry that I will never be as sexually adventurous as Ian’s ex. Yes, I understand, never say never, but I am pretty sure no matter where life takes us, I will not be asking Ian to hold me while some other Twinkie goes down on me. And if that did happen, which it wouldn’t, but let’s just say it did, we would not still be friends with my Twinkie and exchange holiday cards and know her husband and kids. But this is how it is for bad boys. It’s all in the past. He married
me
.

I think the dream of monogamy pretty much died for most women when Hugh Grant cheated on Elizabeth Hurley.

I mean, if a man can’t stay faithful to Elizabeth Hurley, what hope do the rest of us have? Ian tells me he doesn’t find Elizabeth Hurley so attractive. I don’t find that comforting. All that says to me is that if Elizabeth Hurley is not so attractive, the rest of us are even less attractive than I thought.

In any case, Ian’s sexual past is not a huge part of my everyday consciousness. But my subconscious, especially right after we got married, was having a field day with it.

My subconscious was especially concerned with what Ian had told me when we first met—that he might never get married (red flag) because he wasn’t sure he believed in monogamy (bigger red flag), but if he did get married, maybe it would be to a Russian mail-order bride (there is not a flag big enough or red enough for that comment).

But then Ian surpassed all of my expectations and turned out to be a great guy.

Except at night. In my dreams. There Ian was everything you would fear a bad-boy husband would be. He would kiss women right in front of me; he would announce he was leaving me; sometimes he would just ignore me. He would have twosomes, threesomes, foursomes as if I wasn’t there, even though I
was
there (it being my dream and all), standing by, reminding Ian that I was his wife, that we were married, that this was inappropriate behavior for a husband.

I would wake up hurt and upset and confront Ian with everything he had done. And that’s when we started calling this man of my dreams “Evil Ian,” because the real Ian pointed out that he had, in fact, done nothing wrong, given me no reason to have these nightmares, been a great husband from day one. But Evil Ian continued to haunt and taunt me.

Ian started to resent his evil counterpart. “He has all the fun, and I get all the blame,” Ian complained one morning as I recounted what Evil Ian had done with some hottie on a cruise ship.

And it was true. Where was Ian’s reward for going from motorcycle to Vespa if I still woke up angry? Was my subconscious trying to protect me or sabotage me?

If you are a therapist reading this, or even if you aren’t, I’m sure it’s not hard to figure out that I was having trust issues. I’d been disappointed by men in the past, so when Ian told me up front that he was bad news, I took him at his word.

But here’s the thing: Ian was
not
the guy he said he was. He was better than he said he was. Which was enough to blow your mind if you’d been dating as long as I had. Nobody is better than he says he is. One online date will confirm that for you.

So my subconscious was, I guess, trying to work out how a bad boy could be so good. Ian
was
a good man, a good husband, a good lover, and even a good sport as I continued to love and trust him by day and curse Evil Ian by night.

Eventually, my Evil Ian dreams began to subside, which was a relief, because not only was it unfair to Ian, it was unfair to me. If anyone was going to have extramarital sex in my dreams, it should be me. And monogamy is no small undertaking. Men are not the only ones who have trouble adjusting to the idea of sex with the same person day after day, night after night (well, at first; then it’s more like month after month), and yet, I wasn’t even cheating in my dreams. Where was the honor in that?

All I can imagine is that I have been faithful, consciously and subconsciously, because the man of my dreams is now the same man I wake up to. The real Ian finally eclipsed Evil Ian.

Of course, he’s still a bad boy at heart. And in some twisted, unhealthy way, that’s why he’s so dreamy.