What Is a Marriage?

Ten Years, in Three Parts

In the beginning, at Borrego Springs, CA, consulting an oracle.

Dear Beautiful Friends,

Here’s a Tenth Marriage Anniversary in three parts.

The Three Amigos. Bouquet by Liz.

I.

Ten years ago, my parents walked me down a grassy aisle of a friend’s back yard, through two rows of seated friends and family. Everyone smiled up at us with sunny faces before I was dropped off at an altar beneath a willow tree, before the man who would become my husband.

I was 49, getting married for the first time. My dad was 88, my mom was 80. (A year later my mom became ill, my dad suspiciously forgetful, so I really pushed things to the Last Possible Moment). Mom & Dad had been my go-to’s for decades: travel companions, weekend hiking pals, symphony dates, dinner mates, confidantes, first-phone calls, advisors. I was their third wheel, if you can describe a daughter that way. We enjoyed each other’s company immensely, shared common interests, but let’s get real: They were so excited to be handing me off! Not just excited to see the daughter they loved entrusted to the company and care of a man they adored, but that I could be someone else’s . . . um, er . . . problem. I say it with love, I do. It’s the truth. It might have been everything they could do, not to gently push the heel of a shoe into my backside and kick me right into the arms of my silver-fox groom, Steve.

SUPRISE DISCOVERY #1: Transitioning from the literal but mostly metaphorical home of your parents to the literal & metaphorical home of your new husband (50 years vs 2.75 years) is not so easy when you are super close to your parents. It’s impossible to go from: Hey, you, Mister, yes, you, the man whose family name I now use as my own, I love you AND you’re a foreign culture, I love you but it’s taking me a bit to really get used to you, to grow accustomed to LIVING with another person. Am I supposed to act like I’ve known you my entire life, when it hasn’t even been three years? Also: In my family we do not break our spaghetti in half before dropping it in boiling water. Harumph.

👰🤵‍♂️

II.

If you’re lucky,

you will meet a kind, thoughtful, funny man and inherit an amazing family. Two kids, also kind, thoughtful, funny, and most importantly, welcoming. Grandkids, too. There’s the groom’s family of origin—Dad, four siblings, and their kids. All congenial, all possessing sly humor, huge warmth. There are no words to express the appreciation of such a warm welcome, especially when you come on the scene a few months after the beloved wife, mother, sister-in-law, aunt, friend left this world before her time.

We met, I moved in, we traveled, joined families, and married. In two-and-three-quarters years I went from a single middle-aged woman skipping down the street, change jingling in her pocket with hardly a care in the world to: Wife, Stepmom, Grandmother—just. like. that. The care-in-the-world expands, deepens, grows rich and delicious, more complicated, layered. There are more presents to buy, more personality quirks to learn, more mannerisms to copy, more birthdays to remember and forget, more people to visit, more love, more family meals, Sunday dinners, guest bedrooms, more Everything.

Steve, Sean, Erica. Three more Amigos.

Also, if you’re lucky, you marry a man with a decades-long resume of a happy marriage, and knows how to do this partnership thing. Guess who got the better deal here? 🙋🏻‍♀️

SURPRISE DISCOVERY #2: Just because a person is older & wiser, sober and open-minded(ish), it doesn’t mean she will automatically slide into the role of Wife and ROCK IT from Day 1. Yes, it’s true. I thought I’d be so good at this coupling game. A natural! 🐒 In my mind—or the “ideal” as Goethe calls it—I was going to be an AMAZING wife. In reality, I was not. I had overlooked an important detail: to be really, really good at something takes practice. I did not have practice at living with a loving partner. Oops. Thankfully I married a patient man, someone who saw the long game, had a fantastic sense of humor, gave me space to learn the ropes.

We love our family and community. Rehearsal dinner, August 2013.

3.
Here’s what Goethe wrote:

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

Who knew that a person could enter this new marriage frontier with a wish list a mile-long—one rooted more in the Ideal of an envisioned marriage than the Reality of the one you’re actually having? I was like this puppy, a little yap dog, circling Steve’s feet. Let’s walk and talk for HOURS. Can we hike for the ENTIRE DAY? We should go to Paris and Istanbul STAT! Let’s journal in coffee shops together, let’s make goals, write lists! (Steve: I don’t think so.) How about the Opera! (We went, I fell asleep) .

This wish list of Ideals was really a scroll, one I kept adding to over the preceding solo years and DECADES. I was throbbing with HAVE SOME MAKING UP TO DO. My husband did not share this puppy appetite to cross off items on my wish-list’s endless scroll. He’d done it. I wanted to DO IT.

There were times when we would be firmly planted in the reality of daily life. Let’s say watching a British detective show, on a fall evening, after a delicious dinner. When ALL OF A SUDDEN I was visited by this image of a couple reading thick tomes by the fire (something I’ve never done; I read lying down, on a Kindle or paperback, and rarely thick tomes)—and started barking about how we watched too much TV and should be doing something more constructive with our time.

This is the Ideal kicking in the door. A cozy evening becomes an argument—over something I didn’t even really want to do. Ideal vs. Real. Real vs. Ideal. It’s a trickster.

If you’re lucky, you will marry a man who lets you spend ten years cutting your teeth on Marriage for Beginners. He will show you what it looks like to support another person’s life path and give them freedom. He will be your model and inspiration, and challenge you just like he promised in his vows which was the line that excited you the very most. BETTER YET, he will be playful with you, make jokes, show you that you can laugh, together, at the difficult topics because the difficulties are made up. Example: I’m heading out the door to a lake swim with friends.

Steve: “It’s too bad you’re leaving because I really feel like talking. I thought about a bunch of goals for us last night. Also, if I’m not home when you get back, I’m probably hiking up Mt Si.”

SUPRISE #3: How easy it is for a champion day-dreamer to cast a stray eye away from the Real marriage, and all its daily-life beauty. How easy it is to ride the Ego Carriage into the land of Ideal marriage and campaign for the fantasy, like: being some film couple who lives in a penthouse, makes sushi rolls by hand while listening to Puccini, and then reads those tomes by the fire in a loft that is drafty and modern and cold.
PS. Latch onto someone with a sense of humor and play.

We had the BEST tenth anniversary!

I had a lot of Ideal-izing going on around Making It Special. Damn societal conditioning! Finally, Steve said: Let’s take it activity by activity, starting with a swim. We swam. I put on my wedding dress. Steve gave me blue sapphires with diamonds, super fancy. I got the thrill of wearing them to a French cafe we love, then we returned them. Steve got points for the effort, and I got to experience being a fancy lady. We went to a Seattle neighborhood for a long walk and dinner at a new delicious restaurant. Steve took me on THREE WALKS. Back at home, we watched a British detective show, ate a popsicle and went to bed early. It was Ideal and Real.

Who’s to say you can’t have it all?

XOOX