Chapter three 5 страница

So now, a dozen years later, preparing to enter marriage again, it seemed like some more mindful preparations might be in order. The silver lining to the unforeseen long engagement period offered to us by the Department of Homeland Security was that Felipe and I had a luxurious amount of time (every waking hour of the day, actually, for many months on end) to discuss our questions and issues about marriage. And so we did discuss them. All of them. Isolated from our families, alone together in remote places, stuck on one ten-hour-long bus ride after another--all we had was time. So Felipe and I talked and talked and talked, clarifying daily what the shape of our marriage contract would be.

Fidelity, of course, was of primary importance. This was the one nonnegotiable condition of our marriage. We both recognized that once trust has been shattered, piecing it back together again is arduous and agonizing, if not impossible. (As my father once said about water pollution, from his standpoint as an environmental engineer, "It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted.")

The potentially radioactive topics of housework and domestic chores were also fairly simple to address; we'd lived together already and had discovered that we shared these tasks easily and fairly. Similarly, Felipe and I shared a united position on the subject of ever having children (to wit: thanks, but no thanks), and our concordance on this massive subject seemed to erase a textbook-sized volume of potential future marital conflict.

Happily, we were also compatible in bed, so we didn't foresee future problems in the human sexuality department, and I didn't think it was smart to start digging for trouble where none existed.

That left just one major issue that can really undo a marriage: money. And as it turned out, there was much to discuss here. Because while Felipe and I easily agree on what is important in life (good food) and what is not important in life (expensive china on which to serve that good food), we hold seriously different values and beliefs about money. I've always been conservative with my earnings, careful, a compulsive saver, fundamentally incapable of debt. I chalk this up to the lessons taught to me by my frugal parents, who treated every single day as though it were October 30, 1929, and who opened up my first savings account for me when I was in the second grade.

Felipe, on the other hand, was raised by a father who once traded a pretty nice car for a fishing pole.

Whereas thrift is my family's state-sponsored religion, Felipe has no such reverence for frugality. If anything, he is imbued with a natural-born entrepreneur's willingness to take risks, and is far more willing than I am to lose everything and start all over again. (Let me rephrase that: I am utterly unwilling to lose everything and start over again.) Moreover, Felipe doesn't have any of the innate trust in financial institutions that I have. He blames this, not unreasonably, on having grown up in a country with a wildly fluctuating currency; as a child, he had learned to count by watching his mother readjust her reserves of Brazilian cruzeiros every single day for inflation. Cash, therefore, means very little to him. Savings accounts mean even less. Bank statements are nothing but "zeroes on a page" that can disappear overnight, for reasons completely out of one's control.

Therefore, Felipe explained, he would prefer to keep his wealth in gemstones, for instance, or in real estate, rather than in banks. He made it clear that he was never going to change his mind about this.

Okay, fair enough. It is what it is. That being the case, though, I did ask Felipe if he would be willing to let me handle our living expenses and manage our household accounts. I was pretty certain that the electric company would not accept monthly payment in amethysts, so we would have to work out a joint bank account, if only to handle the bills. He agreed to this idea, which was comforting.

What was even more comforting, though, was that Felipe was willing to use our months of travel together to very carefully and very respectfully--over the course of those many long bus rides--work with me on setting the terms of a prenuptial agreement. In fact, he insisted on it, just as much as I did. While this might be difficult for some readers to understand or embrace, I must ask you to please consider our situations. As a self-made and self-employed woman in a creative field, who has always earned my own living, and who has a history of financially supporting the men in my life (and who still, painfully, writes checks to my ex), this subject mattered dearly to my heart. As for Felipe, a man whose divorce had left him not only broken-hearted but also quite literally broke... well, it mattered to him, too.

I recognize that whenever prenuptial agreements are discussed in the media, it is generally because a rich older man is about to marry yet another beautiful younger woman. The topic always seems sordid, a distrustful sex-for-cash scheme. But Felipe and I were neither tycoons nor opportunists; we were just experienced enough to recognize that relationships do sometimes end, and it seemed willfully childish to pretend that such a thing could never happen to us. Anyhow, questions of money are always different when you're getting married in middle age rather than youth. We would each be bringing to this marriage our existing individual worlds--worlds that contained careers, businesses, assets, his children, my royalties, the gemstones he had been carefully collecting for years, the retirement accounts that I had been building ever since I was a twenty-year-old diner waitress... and all these things of value needed to be considered, weighed, discussed.

While drafting a prenup might not sound like a particularly romantic way to spend the months leading up to one's marriage, I must ask you to believe me when I say that we shared some truly tender moments during these conversations--especially those moments

when we would find ourselves arguing on behalf of the other person's best interests. That said, there were also times when this process turned uncomfortable and tense. There was a real limit to how long we could discuss the subject at all, before we would need to take a break from it, change the subject, or even spend a few hours apart. Interestingly, a couple of years later, as Felipe and I were drafting our wills together, we encountered this exact same problem--an exhaustion of the heart that kept driving us away from the table.

It's dreary work, planning for the worst. And in both cases, with both the wills and the prenup, I lost track of how many times we each uttered the phrase "God forbid."

We stayed with the task, though, and got our prenuptial agreement written under terms that made each of us happy. Or maybe "happy" isn't exactly the right word to use when you're conceptualizing an emergency exit strategy for a love story that is still only at its beginning. Imagining the failure of love is a grim job, but we did it anyhow. We did it because marriage is not just a private love story but also a social and economic contract of the strictest order; if it weren't, there wouldn't be thousands of municipal, state, and federal laws pertaining to our matrimonial union. We did it because we knew that it's better to set your own terms than to risk the possibility that someday down the road unsentimental strangers in a harsh courtroom might set the terms for you. Mostly, though, we pushed through the unpleasantness of these very awkward financial conversations because Felipe and I have both, over time, learned this hard fact to be incontrovertibly true: If you think it's difficult to talk about money when you're blissfully in love, try talking about it later, when you are disconsolate and angry and your love has died.

God forbid.

But was I delusional to hope that our love would not die?

Could I dare to even dream of that? I spent an almost embarrassing amount of time during our travels ticking off lists of everything that Felipe and I had going in our favor, collecting our merits like lucky pebbles, piling them up in my pockets, running my fingers over them nervously in a constant search for assurance. Didn't my family and friends already love Felipe? Wasn't that a meaningful endorsement, or even a lucky charm? Hadn't my most wise and prescient old friend--the one woman who had warned me years earlier against marrying my first husband--completely embraced Felipe as a good match for me? Hadn't my hammer-blunt ninety-one-year-old grandfather even liked him? (Grandpa Stanley had watched Felipe carefully all weekend the first time they met, and then finally cast his verdict: "I like you, Felipe," he pronounced. "You seem to be a survivor. And you'd better be one, too--because this girl has burned through quite a few of 'em already.")

I clung to those endorsements not because I was trying to collect reassurances about Felipe, but because I was trying to collect reassurances about myself. For exactly the reason so frankly stated by Grandpa Stanley, I was the one whose romantic discrimination was not entirely trustworthy. I had a long and colorful history of making some extremely bad decisions on the subject of men. So I leaned on the opinions of others in order to prop up my own confidence about the decision I was making now.

I leaned on some other encouraging evidence, too. I knew from our two years already spent together that Felipe and I were, as a couple, what psychologists call "conflict averse." This is shorthand for "Nobody Is Ever Going to Throw Dishes at Anyone from Across the Kitchen Table." In fact, Felipe and I argue so infrequently that it used to worry me. Conventional wisdom has always taught that couples must argue in order to air out their grievances. But we scarcely ever argued. Did this mean we were repressing our true anger and resentment, and that one day it would all explode in our faces in a hot wave of fury and violence? It didn't feel that way. (But of course it wouldn't; that's the insidious trick of repression, isn't it?)

When I researched the topic more, though, I relaxed a bit. New research shows that some couples manage to dodge serious conflict for decades without any serious blowback.

Such couples make an art form out of something called "mutually accommodating behavior"--delicately and studiously folding themselves inside out and backwards in order to avoid discord. This system, by the way, works only when both people have accommodating personalities. Needless to say, it is not a healthy marriage when one spouse is meekly compliant and the other is a domineering monster or an unrepentant harridan. But mutual meekness can make for a successful partnering strategy, if it's what both people want. Conflict-averse couples prefer to let their grievances dissolve rather than fight over every point. From a spiritual standpoint, this idea appeals to me immensely. The Buddha taught that most problems--if only you give them enough time and space--will eventually wear themselves out. Then again, I'd been in relationships in the past where our troubles were never going to wear themselves out, not in five consecutive lifetimes, so what did I know about it? All I do know is that Felipe and I seem to get along really nicely. What I can't tell you is why.

But human compatibility is such a mysterious piece of business anyhow. And not just human compatibility! The naturalist William Jordan wrote a small, lovely book called Divorce Among the Gulls, in which he explained that even among seagulls--a species of bird that allegedly mates for life--there exists a 25 percent "divorce rate." Which is to say that one-quarter of all seagull couples fail in their first relationships--failing to the point that they must separate due to irreconcilable differences. Nobody can figure out why those particular birds don't get along with each other, but clearly: They just don't get along. They bicker and compete for food. They argue over who will build the nest. They argue over who will guard the eggs. They probably argue over navigation, too. Ultimately they fail to produce healthy chicks. (Why such contentious birds were ever attracted to each other in the first place, or why they didn't listen to their friends' warnings, is a mystery--but I suppose I'm hardly one to judge.) Anyhow, after a season or two of strife, those miserable seagull couples give up and go find themselves other spouses. And here's the kicker: often their "second marriage" is perfectly happy, and then many of them do mate for life.

Imagine that, I beg you! Even among birds with brains the size of camera batteries, there does exist such a thing as fundamental compatibility and incompatibility, which seems to be based--as Jordan explains--on "a bedrock of basic psycho-biological differences"

which no scientist has yet been able to define. The birds are either capable of tolerating each other for many years, or they aren't. It's that simple, and it's that complex.

The situation is the same for humans. Some of us drive each other nuts; some of us do not. Maybe there's a limit to what can be done about this. Emerson wrote that "we are not very much to blame for our bad marriages," so maybe it stands to reason that we should also not be overly credited for our good ones. After all, doesn't every romance begin in the same place--at that same intersection of affection and desire, where two strangers always meet to fall in love? So how can anyone at the beginning of a love story ever possibly anticipate what the years might bring? Some of it really has to be chalked up to chance. Yes, there is a certain amount of work involved in keeping any relationship together, but I know some very nice couples who put heaps of serious labor into saving their marriages only to end up divorced anyhow, while other couples--no intrinsically nicer or better than their neighbors--seem to hum along happily and trouble-free together for years, like self-cleaning ovens.

I once read an interview with a New York City divorce court judge, who said that in the sorrowful days after September 11, a surprisingly large number of divorcing couples withdrew their cases from her purview. All these couples claimed to have been so moved by the scope of the tragedy that they decided to revive their marriages. Which makes sense. Calamity on that scale would put your petty arguments about emptying the dishwasher into perspective, filling you with a natural and compassionate longing to bury old grievances and perhaps even generate new life. It was a noble urge, truly. But as the divorce judge noted, six months later, every single one of those couples was back in court, filing for divorce all over again. Noble urges notwithstanding, if you really cannot tolerate living with somebody, not even a terrorist attack can save your marriage.

On the subject of compatibility, I often wonder sometimes, too, if maybe those seventeen years that separate me from Felipe work to our advantage. He always insists that he's a far better partner to me now than he ever could have been to anybody twenty years ago, and I certainly appreciate (and need) his maturity. Or maybe we're just extra careful with each other because the age difference stands as a reminder of our relationship's innate mortality. Felipe is already in his midfifties; I'm not going to have him forever, and I don't want to waste the years that I do have him locked in strife.

I remember watching my grandfather bury my grandmother's ashes on our family's farm twenty-five years ago. It was November, upstate New York, a cold winter's evening. We, his children and grandchildren, all walked behind my grandfather through the purple evening shadows across the familiar meadows, out to the sandy point by the river's bend where he had decided to bury his wife's remains. He carried a lantern in one hand and a shovel over his shoulder. The ground was covered with snow and the digging was hard work--even for such a small container as this urn, even for such a robust man as Grandpa Stanley. But he hung the lantern on a naked tree limb and steadily dug that hole--and then it was over. And that's how it goes. You have somebody for a little while, and then that person is gone.

So it will come to pass for all of us--for all couples who stay with each other in love--that someday (if we are lucky enough to have earned a lifetime together) one of us will carry the shovel and the lantern on behalf of the other. We all share our houses with Time, who ticks alongside us as we work at our daily lives, reminding us of our ultimate destination.

It's just that for some of us Time ticks particularly insistently...

Why am I talking about all this right now?

Because I love him. Have I actually gotten this far in my book without having yet said that clearly? I love this man. I love him for countless ridiculous reasons. I love his square, sturdy, Hobbit-like feet. I love the way he always sings "La Vie en Rose" when he's cooking dinner. (Needless to say, I love that he cooks dinner.) I love how he speaks almost perfect English but still, even after all these years with the language, sometimes manages to invent marvelous words. ("Smoothfully" is a personal favorite of mine, though I'm also fond of "lulu-bell," which is Felipe's own lovely translation for the word

"lullaby.") I love that he has never quite mastered the exact wording or pacing of certain English-language idioms either. ("Don't count your eggs while they're still up inside the chicken's ass," is a terrific example, though I'm also a big fan of "Nobody sings till the fat lady sings.") I love that Felipe can never--not for the life of him--keep straight the names of American celebrities. ("George Cruise" and "Tom Pitt" are two prime examples.) I love him and therefore I want to protect him--even from me, if that makes sense. I didn't want to skip any steps of preparation for marriage, or leave anything unresolved that might reemerge later to harm us--to harm him. Worried that, even with all this talking and researching and legal wrangling, I might be missing some important relevant matrimonial issue, I somehow got my hands on a recent Rutgers University report called "Alone Together: How Marriage Is Changing in America," and went a little crazy with it. This massive tome carefully sorts through the results of a twenty-year survey on matrimony in America--the most extensive such study ever produced--and I pored over the thing like it was the veritable I Ching. I sought solace in its statistics, fretting over charts about

"marital resilience," searching for the faces of Felipe and me hidden within columns of comparable variance scales.

From what I could understand of the Rutgers report (and I'm sure I didn't understand everything), it seemed that the researchers had discovered trends in "divorce proneness,"

based on a certain number of hard demographic factors. Some couples are simply more likely to fail than others, to a degree that can be somewhat predicted. Some of these factors sounded familiar to me. We all know that people whose parents were divorced are more likely to someday divorce themselves--as though divorce breeds divorce--and examples of this are spread across generations.

But other ideas were less familiar, and even reassuring. I'd always heard, for instance, that people who had divorced once were statistically more likely to also fail in their second marriage, but no--not necessarily. Encouragingly, the Rutgers survey demonstrates that many second marriages do last a lifetime. (As with seagull love affairs, some people make bad choices the first time, but do far better with a subsequent partner.) The problem comes when people carry unresolved destructive behaviors with them from one marriage to the next--such as alcoholism, compulsive gambling, mental illness, violence, or philandering. With baggage like that, it really doesn't matter whom you marry, because you're going to wreck that relationship eventually and inevitably, based on your own pathologies.

Then there is the business of that infamous 50 percent divorce rate in America. We all know that classic statistic, don't we? It gets tossed around constantly, and man, does it ever sound grim. As the anthropologist Lionel Tiger wrote trenchantly on this topic: "It is astonishing that, under the circumstances, marriage is still legally allowed. If nearly half of anything else ended so disastrously, the government would surely ban it immediately.

If half the tacos served in restaurants caused dysentery, if half the people learning karate broke their palms, if only 6 percent of people who went on roller coaster rides damaged their middle ears, the public would be clamoring for action. Yet the most intimate of disasters... happens over and over again."

But that 50 percent figure is far more complicated than it looks, once you break it down across certain demographics. The age of the couple at the time of their marriage seems to be the most significant consideration. The younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later. In fact, you are astonishingly more likely to get divorced if you marry young. You are, for example, two to three times more likely to get divorced if you marry in your teens or early twenties than if you wait until your thirties or forties.

The reasons for this are so glaringly obvious that I hesitate to enumerate them for fear of insulting my reader, but here goes: When we are very young, we tend to be more irresponsible, less self-aware, more careless, and less economically stable than when we are older. Therefore, we should not get married when we are very young. This is why eighteen-year-old newlyweds do not have a 50 percent divorce rate; they have something closer to a 75 percent divorce rate, which totally blows the curve for everyone else. Age twenty-five seems to be the magic cutoff point. Couples who marry before that age are exceptionally more divorce-prone than couples who wait until they are twenty-six or older. And the statistics get only more reassuring as the couple in question ages. Hold off on getting married until you're in your fifties, and the odds of your ever ending up in a divorce court become statistically almost invisible. I found this incredibly heartening, given that--if you add together Felipe's age and my age, and then divide that number by two--we average out around forty-six years old. When it comes to the statistical predictor of age, we absolutely rock.

But age, of course, isn't the only consideration. According to the Rutgers study, other factors of marital resilience include:

1. Education. The better-educated you are, statistically speaking, the better off your marriage will be. The better-educated a woman is, in particular, the happier her marriage will be. Women with college educations and careers who marry relatively late in life are the most likely female candidates to stay married. This reads like good news, definitely tipping a few points in favor of Felipe and me.

2. Children. The statistics show that couples with young children at home report "more disenchantment" within their marriage than couples with grown children, or couples who have no children at all. The demands that newborns in particular put on a relationship are considerable, for reasons I am certain I do not have to explain to anyone who has recently had a baby. I don't know what this means for the future of the world at large, but for Felipe and me it was more good news. Older, educated, and babyless, Felipe and I are running some pretty good odds here as a couple--or at least according to the bookies at Rutgers.

3. Cohabitation. Ah, but here is where the tide begins to turn against us. It appears that people who live together before marriage have a slightly higher divorce rate than those who wait until marriage to cohabit. The sociologists can't quite figure this one out, except to wager a guess that perhaps premarital cohabitation indicates a more casual view in general toward sincere commitment. Whatever the reason: Strike One against Felipe and Liz.

4. Heterogamy. This factor depresses me, but here goes: The less similar you and your partner are in terms of race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and career, the more likely you are to someday divorce. Opposites do attract, but they don't always endure. Sociologists suspect that this trend will diminish as society's prejudices break down over time, but for now? Strike Two against Liz and her much older, Catholic-born, South American businessman sweetheart.

5. Social Integration. The more tightly woven a couple is within a community of friends and family, the stronger their marriage will be. The fact that Americans today are less likely to know their neighbors, belong to social clubs, or live near kin has had a seriously destabilizing effect on marriage, across the board. Strike Three against Felipe and Liz, who were--at the time of Liz's reading this report--living all alone in a shabby hotel room in the north of Laos.

6. Religiousness. The more religious a couple is, the more likely they are to stay married, though faith offers only a slight edge. Born-again Christians in America have a divorce rate that is only 2 percent lower than their more godless neighbors--perhaps because Bible Belt couples are getting married too young? Anyhow, I'm not sure where this question of religion leaves me and my intended. If you blend together Felipe's and my personal views on divinity, they comprise a philosophy that one might call "vaguely spiritual." (As Felipe explains: "One of us is spiritual; the other is merely vague.") The Rutgers report offered no particular data about marital-resilience statistics within the ranks of the vaguely spiritual. We'll have to call this one a wash.

7. Gender Fairness. Here's a juicy one. Marriages based on a traditional, restrictive sense about a woman's place in the home tend to be less strong and less happy than marriages where the man and the woman regard each other as equals, and where the husband participates in more traditionally female and thankless household chores. All I can say on this matter is that I once overheard Felipe telling a house-guest that he has always believed a woman's place is in the kitchen... sitting in a comfortable chair, with her feet up, drinking a glass of wine and watching her husband cook dinner. Can I get a few bonus points on this one?

I could go on, but I did start--after a while--to get a little cross-eyed and crazy with all these bits of data. My cousin Mary, who is a statistician at Stanford University, warns me against putting too much weight on these sorts of studies anyhow. They are not meant to be read like tea leaves, apparently. Mary especially cautions me to look carefully at any matrimonial research that measures such concepts as "happiness," since happiness is not exactly scientifically quantifiable. Moreover, just because a statistical study shows a link between two ideas (higher education and marital resilience, for instance) doesn't mean that one necessarily follows from the other. As cousin Mary is quick to remind me, statistical studies have also proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that drowning rates in America are highest in geographical areas with strong ice cream sales. This does not mean, obviously, that buying ice cream causes people to drown. It more likely means that ice cream sales tend to be strong at the beach, and people tend to drown at beaches, because that's where water tends to be found. Linking the two utterly unrelated notions of ice cream and drowning is a perfect example of a logical fallacy, and statistical studies are often rife with such red herrings. Which is probably why, when I sat down one night in Laos with the Rutgers report and tried to concoct a template for the least possible divorce-prone couple in America, I came up with quite a Frankensteinian duo.

First, you must find yourself two people of the same race, age, religion, cultural background, and intellectual level whose parents had never divorced. Make these two people wait until they are about forty-five years old before you allow them to marry--

without letting them live together first, of course. Ensure that they both fervently believe in God and that they utterly embrace family values, but forbid them to have any children of their own. (Also, the husband must warmly embrace the precepts of feminism.) Make them live in the same town as their families, and see to it that they spend many happy hours bowling and playing cards with their neighbors--that is, while they're not out there in the world succeeding at the wonderful careers that they each launched on account of their fabulous higher educations.

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