What Is a Marriage, Other Than Nonstop Fun and Love and Cuddles🤥🤥?
Eleven Years, in Three Parts. Figuring it out one day at a time, having started at almost 50 years old.
Dear Beautiful Friends,
When you’re 60 and have only been married once, it’s strange to say you’ve been married for a whopping ELEVEN YEARS . . . but there you have it. I married at 49, to a widower who’d been married for 33, and it’s been such an intriguing, unexpected ride, I’ve been writing a book about it.
Some questions I’ve had during our 11 years
What is this thing we call “marriage”, this thing we all “want” and strive for, and then when we get it, we get on with the business of wanting MORE, and do a bit of complaining here and there, because . . . we’re in!
This is an update of what I published last year, on our tenth anniversary.
Here’s a little anny gift for you:
A Midlife Marriage in Three Parts, on our Eleventh Anniversary
Eleven years ago, my parents walked me down a grassy aisle of a friend’s back yard, through 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, to face 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!
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.
If you’re lucky—
—you will meet a kind, thoughtful, funny man and inherit an amazing family. Two adult 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. An unexpected love 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.
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? 🙋🏻♀️ Also, someone who, when he says he promises to challenge you, and you like the sound of that, also delivers.
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. Also, I never for one second spent time considering what it meant to be an "amazing” wife, or even an OK one. Oops galore. 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.
Goethe, the clever bastard, 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 a throbbing case of I 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.
If you’re lucky, you will marry a man who lets you spend a few turbulent 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.
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:
Me: [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.”*
*All activities on my relationship wish list that Steve had no intention of ever doing.
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.
In the end: A highlight of marriage was a week when our swimming pool broke, we slept in for seven straight days and had coffee in bed. who knew?
In the end—
We decided to continue having coffee together for at least another year.
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This was such a fun read. Happy Anniversary to you and Steve, and the expanding family you married in to! Lovely photos, too, especially the one where you both seem to be wearing rodeo prize belt buckles?! XXOO