Remember the song we sang in grade school?
Kim and Buck-y
sittin’ in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-GFirst comes Love
then comes Marriage
then comes Baby in a Baby Carriage.
Then Kim turns red; Bucky, too. They both say Nah-ah, and we all say Yeah-hah. Then everyone scatters on the playground.
The rituals of Love. For a long time I thought they were more or less limited to The Crush, Dating, Going Steady, Getting Engaged, and, finally, Marriage and Babies (which, as a kid, I lumped together on account of the first marriage among my siblings being the Shotgun variety).
As I got older I came to realize that somewhere after The Baby Carriage there is also Monotony, Incredibly Hard Work With Little Reward, Fighting, Something Akin to Hatred, and in over 50% of cases, Divorce. Oh yeah, and don’t forget Shared Custody.
The rituals of Love. My, how they’ve changed since the days of Kim and Bucky on the playground.
My marriage resides somewhere between Incredibly Hard Work and Fighting, usually a step this side of Fighting. It’s actually reached a comfortable place, where it might even be able to live ’til death due us part. Living, loving, arguing, loving, living, arguing.
Mom always told me it was good to fight in a marriage. She didn’t elaborate, but she did role model. Usually she was trying to soothe me as I sat in the back seat of the car, hands clutching ears, wailing so as to divert attention from their yelling to my panic that this was in fact It!
I’m pretty sure Mom would take issue with LiveScience when it touts a new study that suggests marriage as a treatment for depression. According to LiveScience, the study shows that marriage provides a greater psychological boost for depressed people than it does for happy people. (Bella DePaulo does a thorough treatment of the study in her blog on Huffington Post.)
Maybe Mom was never depressed enough. She was certainly hot-tempered and liked her naps each day, and she played poker for 30 years in spite of Dad’s insistence that she not. Which, now that I think of it might account for the other bit of marriage advice she always dispensed, which was, Don’t do it.
Or maybe the study was done by the same pro-marriage people (and, specifically, pro-men-and-women-only-marriage people) who sponsored the billboard in Albuquerque that reads something like “Married people have better sex lives.” Better than what?
It hasn’t been my experience that marriage is particularly therapeutic nor hot-and-heavy. I don’t mean to open a can of worms here, and I don’t mean to put down Marriage, especially my own, but Marriage can be great at times, and at times it sucks. Let’s be realistic. Some unions just plain shouldn’t have happened they’re so bad. Others are downright bizarre (just see the documentary Crazy Love, or if it hasn’t come to your town read this review). And a few lucky ones appear to be made in heaven. Appear to be.
Maybe I’m being self-centered, but I tend to believe most normal, relatively healthy marriages mirror my own. My marriage, like me, is presently middle-aged. Sometimes lamenting younger, more experimental days. Sometimes dreading what’s on the other side of the hill. Often operating with enough living under its belt to know which battles to pick and when to quietly appreciate the periods where not only is there no battle at hand but, in fact, a deep sense of peace and contentment.
For the most part I believe my marriage will see the Golden Years and, knock on wood, eventually Very Old Age. I figure the longer I stick with it, the more I’ll master the art of compromise. Mom and Dad, now in their eighties, fight less and rely more on their companionship than ever before. I’ve talked to each one of them, in private, about their marriage. Mom still sometimes says in that voice of hers, “I can’t stand him.” Dad still insists that Mom has always been hard on him.
Marriage is far from perfect, so much so I sometimes can’t understand why it has become the ritual of Love. What I do know is this: Marriage shouldn’t belong to some people and not to others. Everyone should have the right to marry if they want.
If I were in charge of All Things, I’d let anyone who’s willing to swallow the pill go for it. But I’d definitely warn, it’s not a substitute for St. John’s Wort.
Oh, and fighting is OK.
-from Topic post, Rich in Ritual.
ybonesy: I’ve been enjoying reading through red Ravine this afternoon. When I read this in mimbresman’s Practice on “Place,” it reminded me of your post.
“I eventually went back to teaching, and I’m glad I did. Teaching is my main creative outlet, plus teaching brought me to Venezuela and my wife Tania. She is funny, and I enjoy being with her. (I read her my practice, btw.) We are so different yet we are connected. We sometimes don’t even need to speak to each other because we are thinking the same thing. Two cultures, two languages, two skin colors, but one love. Corny but true.”
I’m thinking that there are all different ways to be in a marriage. I’m celebrating my 30th wedding anniversary this summer. My husband and I believe that one of the keys to our long successful marriage is that we have a lot of seperate interests…like my writing, his golf…etc. We carve out a lot of space for each other to grow and change and that keeps our relationship fresh.
I loved the honesty of your piece and the way that you bounced back and forth reflecting on both your marriage and your parents.
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breathepeace, congrats on 30 years. I, for one, find it astounding. When I was visiting with my two long lost aunts yesterday, one had been with her partner for around 35 and the other, her husband for about the same. When you spend that many years with someone, a new level of intimacy happens. There is a willingness to really stay the course. I admire that.
For me, ybonesy captured a little of that with:
operating with enough living under its belt to know which battles to pick and when to quietly appreciate the periods where not only is there no battle at hand but, in fact, a deep sense of peace and contentment.
I look forward to many years with my partner. Perhaps there are differences – yet many ways I imagine that all long-term relationships share some of the same characteristics – many that you’ve both mentioned above.
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BTW, interesting article link in your post on how depressed people find a greater psychological boost from marriage than happy people. I agree with the article – I bet it is the support and companionship.
It seems like the older you get, too, the more you are looking for companionship and support, rather than the hot and heavy. Not that I don’t still like the hot and heavy. But different things are important to me.
Yes, and anyone should be able to marry. And why exactly IS marriage the barometer for love? I can’t understand that either.
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Yes, as unconventional as I thought I was, I still went for marriage. (Although, it’s unconventional in its own way.)
I do believe married couples pass certain mile markers that deepen their commitment, and not just in a “taking it for granted” way either. Thirty years is a huge accomplishment. (Geez, breathepeace, did you marry at 12?)
I’ve been married 16 years, 17 this year. Getting past 5, then 7, then 10 – all significant. Now heading to 20, wow. I guess back to the question about marriage as a barometer, I do have to wonder if I would have been as committed as I am had I not gone through the ritual of marriage and then having children together.
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Guess it’s time for the 54-year-old lesbian Christian who’s never been in an intimate relationship longer than four years and eight months, to weigh in on this topic.
First, ybonesy, thanks for the liberating honesty. I remember a scene in the movie, “Wetherby” (1985) — a heartbreaking movie starring Ian Holm and Vanessa Redgrave and written and directed by David Hare — where the Ian Holm character says something like, “If you don’t want to be alone, for God’s sake, don’t get married.” I’ve been lonely alone and lonely in a relationship and I’ll take lonely alone in a heartbeat.
Marriage is a great strain on love, and frankly, I don’t know why gays and lesbians want what seems to me to be a very tired institution. I think we can create something better — that includes the church, the law, whatever. I can name only about a half a dozen marriages I admire, and the one I admire most is the one between my spiritual mentor and her husband. The only reason I think it has worked is because they have lived apart about four days a week (he commutes to the University of MA) their entire time of their 25+ years of marriage.
I have sucked big time at relationships and I blame my own parents’ marriage — I had nothing to go on, really. Plus, their parenting skills were awful, so I had to unlearn all sorts of behavior that destroys relationships, like wanting control ALL THE TIME.
All that being said, I’ve gotten a lot better and am baffled and grateful for Adrienne. She continues to amaze me because she is so disarming. She calls me on my b.s. and makes me laugh all at once. We had this exchange recently:
Adrienne: “I’ve never bickered so much with a lover.”
Sharon: “And I’ve never bickered so little.”
We laughed. Maybe one of the keys is to take each other for better or worse, but not for granted.
Hmmmm. I’ll be thinking about this ALL DAY. And breathepeace — wow — 30 YEARS. I’ll be 81 years old when I achieve that with Adrienne.
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I’ve always thought if anyone could not only survive but actually thrive in a long-distance relationship, I’m that girl. A friend of mine from work took an expat assignment in Asia for two years, sans her husband. Everyone was sure they were going to get divorced, but it worked out fine. She’s back now over a year; they just returned from a two-month trip island-hopping.
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot since I wrote this piece, and I’m starting to believe that maybe it is my “third thing” – one of those areas of passion and intense focus. And it has its own strange history among women in my family – my grandmother, mother, myself.
Sharonimo: this matter of wanting to control – it’s very central in my personality as well. People don’t realize that because I also have a developed a strong diplomatic side that I show to many people, but I drop that diplomacy in the house. I’m realizing it’s a ballast, though, to my desire to dominate.
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BTW, Sharonimo, I had been looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this piece, so thanks for weighing in.
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[…] to post Marriage, Not Prozac? -from Topic Post, Rich In […]
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You are very welcome ybonesy. In my hurry to hurl my opinion about your post out to the cyberworld, I didn’t tell you which paragraphs of your post were parTICularly wonderful. Two parts, actually. First, the paragraph that begins, “My marriage resides somewhere between Incredibly Hard Work and Fighting, usually a step this side of Fighting.” Second, the paragraph that begins, “Maybe I’m being self-centered, but I tend to believe most normal, relatively healthy marriages mirror my own. . . .” Then that tie in to middle age, ending with peace and contentment, etc. So wise, ybonesy, so wise. When you are older, you will have the spirit of that woman you took to when you went to that wedding and then produced the image you posted. An image, by the way, that seems to capture the Incredibly Hard Work and Fighting place where your marriage now resides. Take a look at that image. Pretty fascinating.
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Yes, I knew that without having to go back and look at the image, but I went back and looked anyway.
I soon as I was finished with the drawing that the man has Jim’s nose exactly. Now mind you, the man the the drawing was fashioned after had an aquiline nose, whereas Jim’s is more rounded at the end. And then I drew the woman with a nose more like mind and with my same deep lines coming from the sides of my nose down to my lips.
Yep, they look like the kind of people who’ve been working hard all their lives and are still ready for a good fight. Her, especially :O
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ybonsey,
This post has been staying with me for the last two days and has taken me down several different trains of thought. I would like to share some of those with you:
My first thoughts as I read this was, “I wonder what her husband will think when he reads this and realizes that everyone will know they fight!” I guess in my memories I was brought up thinking you can fight but only when the kids can’t hear it. I believed that appearances were important and in a 50’s kind of way you put on a good front.
After that socially conditioned response passed I thought, “How refreshing to have her be so open and honest about a subject you don’t hear to many people talk about openly.” It was like hearing about the new “position” you tried last night. Everyone does it but no one talks about it openly except with your closest friend(s).
Then I started to think about your observations in respect to my experiences and realized that marriage starts out with a lot of unrealistic expectations. When the reality is about how you adjust to the reality of two distinctly different people with different goals having to compromise daily to maintain the “happiness” in their lives it becomes suspect that more marriages aren’t ending in divorce. But that was a little too simplistic because there are other things at work, like the physical attraction, the endomorphism rushes from sex and melding of individual goals into common goals.
In marriage I was extremely happy. The plans for my live were directly tied to joint goals and we worked towards them even though we had different expectations of how to reach them. After we separated I started to realize that I was making compromises without even thinking about them because I was married. These were compromises that I would not choose to make as a single person. I am not sure what that means, I am still working on that.
These are just a few of the things your post brought out. Thanks for being so open and causing me to think about how other marriages work.
R3
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This comment made all the fear I had about posting that piece worth it.
My first thought after hitting “Publish” was, How is he going to feel when he reads this? I read it out loud to him last night. That’s what you said, he asked. Yeah, well, I said.
I have a group of friends who write together. One time we started talking about our fights with significant others. None of us is in a new relationship. We’re all 9+ years with the same person, some up to 30. We laughed about the fights we’ve had with our spouses/partners.
I guess I took my mother’s advice to heart. When you hear something enough, and see it, you don’t think it’s odd. It becomes normal. Jim and I don’t fight every day, and weeks go by, months even without fights. We get into cycles of stress, and during those cycles we argue more than when we’re not in those cycles.
I’m finding I’m accepting me and him and our personalities and the realities of compromise. But I could also be happy as a single person. So I wrote my piece in the spirit of saying, Marriage isn’t all it’s made out to be. Like anything else in life, it is whole and complex and completely three-dimensional.
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ybonesy — the day this posted, I sent out an email to all of my beloveds struggling in relationships (which included everyone except about three), I got back many response s via my personal email about your honesty. There’s something about seeing the honesty in print, where the words don’t hang and then disappear in the air as they do when you converse and/or argue. One beloved said she was inspired to “honor” your words by stepping up to the honesty plate herself in her marriage.
When to be honest is a tough call, though. Emily Dickinson has said, “the truth must dazzle gradually”. I have that quote on a post-it on the stem of my desk lamp because I tend to clobber people of the heads with what I think is the truth. “Wait for your moment,” my spiritual mentor CONSTANTLY says to me. You waited for yours, ybonesy. It dazzled.
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I just reread my last post and found it funny that spell check turned my misspelled word endorphins into endomorphism. Even funnier that they both work in this post.
I am glad that you posted it and I think your husbands reaction was similar to what mine would be had it been written about me. I probably would have asked for some clarification to make sure we were on even footing but it would have been ok.
I agree with your mother, I think we all habituate to the things we do or experience frequently. And who is to say what is normal when everyone hides behind the veil of secrecy in our private lives that guards us from prying eyes and judgments of others.
In marriage and relationships there should be no right or wrong way to do it. We are all individuals and as such are responsible for our individual happiness. If you are fortunate enough to find someone who is willing to share that journey with you and with whom you can find long moments of happiness together, does it really matter how you accomplish it?
I say, keep fighting! It shows you have not lost your individuality in the relationship and that you are willing to stand up for those things that are important to you or hurt you or are passionate for you. It also binds you closer as you both compromise your needs/expectations for the relationship.
Sharonimo’s friends stand behind your approach to relationships and that alone should tell you that you are on a good path.
Thanks again for taking my mind for a walk to places it hasn’t been in some time and for providing another way to look at relationships.
R3
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Here, here R3! About 20 years ago, I interviewed the founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Bernice Johnson Reagon for The Other Side magazine, and the last question I asked her was about how she wanted to be remembered when she died. She gave a long and insightful answer, but following is how the ilast thing she said and how the interview ended:
“The only time I have ever experienced worrying about when I die is when I have fallen in love with another person. I’ll say to God, “I might be on your list to go tomorrow, but could you just wait and let me see how this is going to work out?” I want God to give me a little more time to experience living in the universe bonded with another human being.”
Her answer is stuck on my heart like a barnacle on a ship. There must be something in the experience of living in the universe bonded with another human being that is . . . well, worth the agony of the journey.
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R3, I didn’t even catch your misspell:
[I just reread my last post and found it funny that spell check turned my misspelled word endorphins into endomorphism. Even funnier that they both work in this post.]
You are right! They do both work in the post. I remember thinking, wow, he used endomorphism in a comment. 8)
On ybonesy, I often am struck by her level of honesty in her writing for the blog (and in her practice). Blogland is a difficult in-between writing space where we are constantly weighing how honest and revealing we can be against the vision and mission of our blog (and the personal facets of our lives). It’s a delicate line that we tread every day. She is a master (mistress) at it.
Sharonimo, you interviewed Bernice? Amazing quote from her. I think finding healthy and productive ways of bonding with other humans is truly the hardest thing we will do on this planet. Risking intimacy – that’s what we do in writing and art. And that’s what we do in our close relationships. It sure requires a lot of integrity. I know I don’t always hit the mark. But it seems like we’re all trying to do the best we can.
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Yes, QuoinMonkey, I did interview Bernice several years ago and won a magazine interviewing award. It’s on my website. Here’s the link (I hope this works. Sorry if it doesn’t):
http://www.sharonjanderson.com/articles/reagon.html
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I was also impressed by the use of that word, and maybe because it evoked orgasmic imagery, it fit completely in the context.
OK, another secret: About twice or three times I year depending on the year I tell Jim, We’ve got to get a divorce. He’ll look at me like I’ve lost my mind. We just need to communicate more, he’ll say, or, We just need to… . At times it does feel like we’re bonded. And I don’t mean that in a negative way.
I’m a flight person. If I were married to another flight person, we *would* have divorced long ago, and I would have gone through several more relationships where I eventually left. Leaving is my nature. I don’t dig in. If it’s work and I get mad at someone, I’m immediately plotting ways to get out of that place.
I’m not sure it’s that kind of “being bonded” that Reagon was referring to, but in some strange way I think there’s a part of that in her words. There is some sense of peace in letting go of the constant urge to move on.
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ybonesy, letting go of the constant urge to move on – peaceful image.
Sharonimo, thanks for the link. I found these lines from your interview very powerful:
Every day and every minute when somebody sees you they should stop and turn around because of the noise. Somebody should know you have walked in that space. That’s witnessing. I’m not just talking about what you wear. I’m talking about making visible in every atmosphere you’re in, the stance you represent. And if you do that everyday, then you can die any time.
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ybonesy — I am also very much a flight person, so I am very glad to be married to someone who stays and stays and stays. Well, as married as I can be. Which is to say that we are coming up on the 10th anniversary of our first wedding and will go to Canada and be married legally — I guess we have the “special right” of having to leave the country to acquire the legal status of marriage automatically granted every other citizen of the U.S. Anyway, we’ve both bought nice day length wedding dresses and are working on our French.
And I have found marriage to be wonderful, affirming, infuriating and irreplaceable. My grandparents were married for 70 years — my grandfather always said he spent the second 35 years making up for the first 35, and I always saw them as loving and affectionate partners to one another. When I was little, I looked at them and then my parents and thought man, my folks don’t know what the hell they are doing. It’s all in the mix, though, I guess.
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I’m glad you’re going to exercise that “special right.”
You know, it’s hard to imagine a 70-year marriage, not only for the sheer length of it, but also just the logistics. How young they must have been when they got married and how old they both lived. My parents celebrated 60 years this year.
Yesterday I had a deja vu experience of being young and seeing my Grandma say something to my Grandpa, except it was me saying something to Jim. It was weird!
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