What to read when you're married.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me...
I have the dream often enough that if I say to my husband, “I had the dream again,” he knows which one I mean. In it, I’m back in my first marriage. Sometimes I know my second husband exists and sometimes I don’t, but always I know I’m not supposed to be there, that I’ve subverted time and space and things are very, very wrong. The uncharitable read of this dream is that the first marriage was bad and the second is my reward, and my subconscious is fond of replaying the lucky escape. But that’s reductive. My first marriage, a decade long, was what it was: a lot of fun, loving, lonely, and a necessary lesson in what marriage is, which I didn’t know when, at 23 (!), I booked a venue and bought a dress and spoke vows I couldn’t keep.
My first husband was, and is, a terrifically sharp and individualistic man, my high school sweetheart, bursting with talent and ideas and jokes. A man invested in his passions to the exclusion of much else. A man who wanted almost none of the things I did, which he indicated in a variety of ways I chose to ignore. He let me do so because he loved me in the way young people love each other: hugely and wildly and with little sense. We fought just as avidly. We suspected, accused, insulted, raged, wept. So many wailing dramas. So much big, loud youth. Once, he spent his health insurance payment on gifts for me. Once, he flipped the car we were in, totaling it, and we spent the rest of the day riding bikes in the summer sun, overjoyed to be alive. We were kids, and it was ecstatic and bracing and in no way preparative for actual life.
The cracks were visible before the wedding, and I ignored those, too. But in marriage as in everything else, what you refuse to see gets louder and louder until refusal is beside the point. On our first anniversary, we separated (auspicious!), and then came the middle years: reuniting, more ignoring, mutual wounding. I realized that he intended to live as he wished, and I was welcome to join; he realized that what I wanted was for him to be someone he wasn’t. It was sad that we had to divorce, but boy did we have to. We were murder-suiciding in slow motion. We rarely hung out sober. We no longer shared any friends or hobbies. I vacationed alone. The oxygen supply snuffed, we became automatons, ghosts reenacting our deaths. So, I found a place and hired movers and on the final night, we held each other on the couch as I sobbed into his jacket. Then, after a long time, I stood and said goodbye.
Papers filed, I waited on the postcard the city of New York sends when your divorce is final—a postcard you provide, any one you want. Mine bore a flying white egret. I assured friends I’d never remarry. I wasn’t jaded or broken, just tired. All passion spent. What sane person would risk being that fucking miserable again? How would I even meet someone? Dating felt hilariously remote, like qualifying for the Olympics or becoming an astronaut. Who could ever know me as he had?
I was remarried within a year.
The universe bowled a near-perfect man at me at a hugely imperfect time—a grand cosmic joke. A thoughtful and sociable man, erudite, gentle, old fashioned, with mirthful eyes and palpable character, who my sister called “ridiculously nice” after their first meeting. A man I could not, cannot, imagine keeping something from me. We met in June and by July were giggling over beers about which less-trafficked sport our future kid should play to get a scholarship. (I think we said golf, but this morning he swore it was competitive swimming.) Then that future child abruptly ceased to be theoretical—another cosmic joke—so he “asked” me to marry him. Our plans had been accelerated, but the point is that we had plans that were ours. You can have them if you want the same things. You can have them if you see yourself as part of something.
Two months before our son was born, at the City Clerk’s Office across from where I’d filed for divorce—the postcard had arrived some months prior, scuffed from its journey—we said the words that turned us from fiancés to spouses. We kept it quiet to avoid dimming our future wedding’s shine, and because, we told ourselves, the proceedings were largely practical: If I was incapacitated while giving birth, he needed to be able to make medical decisions. (Isn’t it romantic…) But it didn’t feel merely practical. It felt very real, and all at once. After, we walked around the Museum of Natural History in dazed silence, holding hands. We bought our fetus a T-shirt. We were happy—this had always been our destination. But it hadn’t gone down as we’d imagined, and there was grief in that.
You know what we did with that grief? We discussed it. Sat with it, together. We did not treat unpleasantness like a chemical too volatile to handle. We did not recoil. By dinner we were giddy again, ordering three desserts. This is how we’ve continued: unified in the face of both good and bad, willing to dissect and excavate until we understand the other fully. (We also always order dessert.) Maybe that principle sounds simple to you, even obvious. If so, you probably have a good marriage, too, and don’t realize that not all of them function this way.
It’s odd to talk so much about failed unions in an essay about marriage, but it’s also fitting. In a speech at my sister’s wedding three years ago, I rhapsodized about marriage and its meaning, then delivered the punchline: “And trust me, I know what I’m talking about: I’ve done it twice.” I wasn’t entirely joking. A divorcee knows lots about marriage, having had the chance to autopsy one. Regret makes a fine scalpel. My postmortem report: the first time around, I’d mistakenly equated matrimony and love. I thought marriage was about the bond between two people—I mean just the bond, that it could rest solely on rapport, your affection and heat and inside jokes. I thought, we already live together, now we get to have a big party. But a party isn’t partnership, and living together isn’t being married, and people in their twenties aren’t adults. I don’t mean that those who marry young can’t end up happy—it’s a question of whether they grow in the same direction as they figure out the world and themselves. We didn’t.
The bond is a fraction of the thing. The bond won’t save you. Marriage, done properly, is a construction project. What will you build, what will be the armature holding up your future? Who knows, but you don’t get to draw up the plans alone. Marriage is surrender: Here, take my life and be as much in charge of it as I am. Marriage is incessant inventory: What’s up, how’d you feel about that, you good? Marriage is maligned as the death of choice, but if you care about it, it’s nothing but choice: Every day, you wake up and choose that person again. If you don’t, if you passively choose by not choosing, expect your union to die a protracted death.
I would’ve thought in my early twenties that certain parts of my current marriage—in which the nuts and bolts of our present and future are worked out deliberately, in which practicality is baked into a vast and joyful and unfussy love—were the dull concerns of unromantic old people. But all that blind devotion means nothing without scaffolding. Absent that, you’re just friends who fuck. Same goes for those who hide from each other. I tell this husband everything—the shameful, the taboo, the insane, the mundane—and he blithely accepts it all. Because he doesn’t judge, I never have to pretend. If I could, I’d explain to my younger self that nothing is more romantic than total candor and the trust it implies. That there is no greater gift. That I was a fool to never give it until now, and that I was starving for having never received it.
The horror in that recurring dream isn’t about being married to my first husband again—he’s a good man, and I’m glad he’s happy now. The dream is about the misery of self-betrayal, an existence in which lying to myself was the only way I knew how to survive. In the dream, it’s not that I’m in the wrong marriage—it’s that I’m the wrong me.
In this marriage, though, I’m the right me, the real one. And so now, I often look at my husband and think, Who could ever know me as he does?
The books that follow each have something wise to say about this strange and lovely institution, and I hope they ease and aid your journey—to the altar, the marriage bed, couple’s counseling, the living room. To wherever you’re going, together.
1.
Author: William Maxwell
Book; Fiction (1948)
A friend gifted me this book years ago, calling it the best portrayal of marriage she’d read. It takes almost no time at all to see why it’s extraordinary. (The first clue is the author’s name, because if there’s a text by William Maxwell that doesn’t come within an inch of perfection, I’ve yet to find it.) When the story opens, Austin King and his pregnant wife, Martha, are mired in a fight—the kind familiar to marrieds everywhere, in which active argument has ceased but amends remain unmade. Martha lies face down on the bed, refusing to answer Austin’s apologies though company waits downstairs. “He stood waiting for…some indication that the hand which had so often searched blindly for his hand was ready to make peace.” Only on page 22 do we learn that Austin has no idea why his wife is angry. We learn other things, too: that there’s a secret drawer in Martha’s dresser that contains only bits of ribbon and a pincushion because Martha has no secrets—but that Austin hides his secrets elsewhere. We learn of the tender familiarity they share, for better and for worse. “Beautiful (and dear to him) though her ordinary face was…it was a beauty that was all known to him.” And finally, we learn his crime: Upon the arrival of the guests, who are distant members of Austin’s family, Martha perceived an unseemly spark between Austin and his foster cousin, Nora. (Turns out Martha’s quite perceptive, and that the clan’s visit will be fateful, indeed.) The beauty of the ordinary isn’t only an apt description of Martha’s face, but also of the experience of reading this quiet and masterfully precise novel, in which a minute gesture is enough to charge the air or break a heart.
2.
Author: Jung Yun
Book; Fiction (2016)
Though the dominant themes of this swift and sorrowful novel—Asian-American assimilation, what children owe to terrible parents—are unrelated to marriage, the dynamic of the couple at its center is illustrative of an important idea. Kyung, the son of Korean immigrants, and Gillian, Irish-American, have achieved a precarious version of the American dream, buying a house they can’t afford, and the peril of their situation—and their gutting response to it—speaks to the complex link between marriage and money. The question of finances lurks at the edge of every union; a wedding, after all, is as much merger as merrymaking. The purchase of the family home holds especial psychic weight. In the American imagination, homeownership signals both arrival and assumed ascension, of linear prosperity that will only continue. The foundation of a married couple’s house is built as much on hope as concrete and rebar. Which means that any sensation of backsliding, of middle-class certainty crumbling underfoot, can feel as much like a marital failing as a financial one. Something to think about before hitting up realtors, perhaps.
3.
“Interiors”
Author: Kathleen Collins
Short Story, from Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (2016)
This elliptical story has no time for plot or explanation, but frankly doesn’t need either. Its arresting fragments are enough, evoking aspects of marriage so familiar your breath catches: the way in which daily tedium is both comforting and blunting, the distances and silences that swell and contract, the immensity of the love at stake, the inevitability of occasionally failing each other. Half the piece is spoken by Husband, the other by Wife, and the disconnect between them is so great that no lines directly address each other. But somehow, in their accrual, a story is told in its entirety. A few of the best lines:
Husband: “I was never a pleasure to have around…too moody…an intimidating nuisance flyleafing his way across time on a whim, any old whim…appalled by the mirthless accommodation of adulthood…”
Wife: “It was one of my finer moments when I discovered that no human life escapes the tribulation of solitude…”
Husband: “I won’t apologize for loving you so little…life has so many tuneless days…what better posture to take than to become a whimsical motherfucker?”
Wife: “You called long-distance collect…I asked you for a baby…you laughed and agreed to call me again this time next year…”
I wish I could better explain this story to you, but you must read for yourself—the whole collection, in fact. It’s a treasure trove.
Extra Credit: Kathleen Collins, who died in 1988—her stories were collected and published posthumously—was primarily a filmmaker, and her film Losing Ground (1982) was among the first American feature films directed by a Black woman. It too has a lot to say about marriage.
4.
Author: Megan Hunter
Book; Fiction (2020)
What association does this word—harpy—conjure? My husband would say this moment from The Simpsons, itself a reference to another instant association of the word. Ornithologists might imagine the same-named eagle; those versed in myth, a winged woman-beast. And some women might hear the word and recall a man pulling a face or adopting a tone that said, You’re annoying me in a particularly female way. These women might flash to a time when they held their tongue to avoid being a nag or shrew or pecking hen. You can be Buddha-level enlightened, but if you live in this country, you’re not immune to this sort of gender baggage, which gets lugged, however subtly, into most every heterosexual marriage.
This slim, eerie novel unpacks this baggage both poetically and perversely. After the wife at its center learns her husband is having an affair, the couple opts to stay together but devises a consensual revenge plot: she will hurt him three times, without warning. As we wait for the hammer to drop, we read excerpts of her academic studies of the harpy, the mythical bird-woman; see scenes of a childhood in which her father routinely hurt her mother; and bear witness to a mildly hackneyed but forgivable metamorphosis. The book is an elegant primer on female rage—about the demand, and impossibility, of being everything to everyone; about the creeping sense that even if you found a way, nobody would care—that it’s only when you fail that someone notices; about male mistreatment and dismissal echoing through generations, how we see it as girls before we experience it as women; about the burdens of domesticity, and how easily your home life can become your whole life. In short, it’s about what marriage means, and has meant, for a vast swath of American women, and the slimy runoff of misogyny that so often pollutes it. The parts per million may vary, but rarely is it zero.
The term “gaslighting” has become ubiquitous, but it’s a helpful example of the almost imperceptible sexism that infects us all. It’s a weapon, after all, most effectively used by men seeking to sow self-doubt in women. (Yes, women can gaslight men—but when one party is from a group reflexively dismissed as crazy and one isn’t, is it really the same?) When the wife in the novel feels early spidey tingles about the woman she later learns is screwing her husband, she makes the typical inquiries: “Do you want to sleep with her? I asked him. I think it’s best if we’re just really clear about this.” What does he do? You already know what he does. He laughs at her. Who, me? Couldn’t be! And then, in a sexism twofer, he obliquely mocks the mistress for being old and unpretty and thus not a threat:
“I wish you’d get to know her, he said. She’s— He paused, the silence standing in for dullness, advanced age, sour breath. She’s married, he said finally.”
5.
Author: Anne Carson
Book; Poetry (2001)
The darkest side of marriage strangely echoes a familiar paradox of—stay with me, here—parenthood: when someone knows they’re loved, they know it’s safe to be vicious. (I try to take it as a compliment when my small son lashes out at me, trusting in my devotion; if my spouse did the same, I’d be less flattered.) In Carson’s blend of poetry, essay, and fiction, a woman falls under the sway of a flagrantly uncaring man. One evening at a restaurant, a year after their wedding, he shows her “with shy pride” a photo of his mistress. The tenets of their marriage are funhouse-mirror freakish, and it evokes the micro-world-building that occurs once two people wed. A couple invents its own universe, teaching each other to live in it. In the world this couple makes, adultery needn’t be secret, and rage over betrayal comes as an irritating surprise: “Quick work I said. Are you going to be arch he said.” (She is, for the entirety of the book, to excellent effect.) In their world, you can keep eating dinner after such a disclosure. Sex is both a palpable presence (see: the mistress, the speaker’s intense attraction to her husband, thanks to his titular “beauty”) and a strange absence: “Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I’m not sure we got it right.” Grief is mistaken for closeness: “We have this deep sadness between us and its spells so habitual I / can’t / tell it from love.” The point is that in every marriage, the couple in question invents this private place as well as its rules, its weather, its laws of physics, and its rosters of things sensical and not. The hope, of course, the key to it all working, is that you invent them together.
Next time: What to read when you turn 40…