Marriage is the final event of innumerable movies and novels. The couple is pronounced man and wife, they kiss, and the closing credits roll, or the book runs out of words. Marriage is thus treated as a conclusion, an ending, an act of completion. And to be sure, it is. But it is also the beginning of something, and to find out what that something is like, there are few novels and movies. I have had to turn instead to my long-married friends for guidance.
Married a month myself, I have become an eager pupil. I want to learn how married couples do things. Which household errands are run separately, which ones together? Who keeps track of the schedule? Who handles the money? If there is only one car, who drives it? And on and on.
I was an expert on being single by dint of the fact that I was single for 36 years. I have developed so many theories and ideas about the varying natures of single men and single women that I could teach a Learning Annex course. I could look at an unmarried couple in a bar and almost instantly know how long they had been going out, which one wanted to get married and which one didn’t, and whether it would last. But I am bereft of theories when it comes to marriage; I am on unfamiliar territory even in my own living room, where I find myself wandering around unsure where I should sit. Is this “my” chair, or is it my wife’s (amazing to write those two words)? Can I just turn on the TV while she is reading the paper, or would that be an intrusion? Do I get to pick the show, or should we consult?
My friends are all amused by my inquiries. Don’t rush things, they say. There are no set formulas. Domestic matters work themselves out over time, and in any case, nothing is set in stone; things change, you adapt.
They are right, too, and yet I keep asking the questions: When you were first married, did you want to go out more and party until the kids arrived and you could party no longer? Or did you feel the urge to stay home and enjoy the nest? Is it okay, when you are driving in the car with your spouse, to fall silent for five minutes at a time, or is that an indication that you are going to turn into one of those couples you see, married 30 years, who sit facing each other in restaurants and do not speak during an entire meal?
As an expert on the single life, I believed the old cliche that men feared commitment because of its permanence — that men basically took the message of cinematic romance far too literally and figured marriage was synonymous with the words “The End.” Actually, though, there is nothing that feels quite as static and permanent as the life of a single man because no matter the adventure, you always end up back in the same place: alone on a weekend morning with nothing to do all day.
Maybe the cliche has it exactly backwards. Maybe by getting married, you slowly learn to accept a certain measure of impermanence in every other facet of existence but your romantic life. Impermanence isn’t quite the right word, though — “instability” might be better.
Marriage is, of course, supposed to be stabilizing, but it is constantly subjected to experiences any single person would find horribly disruptive to his equilibrium. Put two people in a room, and suddenly a difficulty that besets one of them has a direct effect on both. That is destabilizing. So is the birth of children, who introduce sleeplessness, demands, needs, and a whole new range of emotions into the hearts of their parents.
Now my wife and I are saving to buy a house, and I am looking forward to that — what could be more permanent than a house, especially for someone who has lived his entire life in apartments? But suddenly I am hearing tales I never paid attention to before — stories about roofs that need replacing, or water damage following a flood, or a contractor who does a really lousy job. Even something as solid and steady as a house might be subject to the instabilities caused by nature itself.
So I guess the questions I am asking are all a way of seeking reassurance that marriage has rules and regulations that will come to be as clear to me in their way as the ones that governed my life when I was single. My wife needs no such reassurance. Everything is going great, she says; we get along so well that we will be able to work out whatever differences we have without too much trouble. I love her all the more when I hear her speak such words; in her calm, there is the permanence I seek.
JOHN PODHORETZ
