was nervous making the call. She said she’d like to accept a date with me if I was still interested. Of course, I was.
We lived fifty-five miles apart, but we ended up seeing each other for dinner three Friday nights in a row. After the second dinner, I walked her to her car, leaned toward her, and kissed her. Lorrie thought I was being forward. The way she tells the story now, she was “taken aback a little bit.” But I kissed her for a reason. I wanted her to know that I wanted to kiss her, and that I found her attractive. I’m glad I kissed her. I’d do it again. (In fact, I have.)
That kiss was a turning point, and she began warming up to me, too. For more than a year, we went back and forth between her home in Pleasant Hill and mine in Belmont. Eventually it just felt right to move in together. In early 1988, we settled into my place.
I’ll never forget coming home to Lorrie for the first time after being away on a four-day trip. The house was glowing. She had music on, the food on the stove smelled wonderful, and the house was warm and inviting. “If I had known it would be like this,” I told her, “I’d have insisted we move in together sooner.”
Marriage was the obvious next step, and on the morning of our wedding, June 17, 1989, I wrote Lorrie a letter: “I can’t wait to marry you. I want you and need you and love you with all my heart.”
I meant every word of that, but it’s hard for a groom on his wedding day to fully understand all the challenges of marriage. Lorrie and I would have to learn to face a lot of obstacles together. There were adventures ahead that we never could have predicted.
LORRIE PROVIDES a lot of the color in our lives. She’s intuitive, emotional, creative, more at ease with people, and more outgoing. In certain ways, she’s more innately optimistic than I am. It can take a lot to get me to smile, but you’ll often find Lorrie walking around with a smile on her face for no particular reason. Before Flight 1549 made me recognizable, we’d go to parties and everyone would remember Lorrie. As for me, couples would drive home saying to each other, “I think he said he was an airline pilot.”
I’m analytical, methodical, more of a scientist. I am able to fix things. I’m optimistic if I’ve reviewed the information and decided that I can make something work. Otherwise, I’m pretty much a realist. Together, Lorrie and I like to say, we become one whole person. So in a lot of respects, we’re a good fit.
Of course, our differences also get in the way. “When you’re the emotional one, you want your spouse to emote more,” Lorrie says. I do try, but I’m not always good at it. She wants to have detailed discussions about our relationship and our family dynamics. I’m more specific. What are the issues? What steps can I take to correct a problem?
I’ve asked Lorrie: “If things are going OK, why do we need to talk about them so much?”
I can feel close to Lorrie by touching her hand or giving her a hug. I’m nonverbal. She says it takes more effort than that to have a real relationship—and that means conversation.
I try. But sometimes, by the end of the day, you can feel you’ve said everything you’ve wanted to say. I’ve had to learn that it’s important to save something for Lorrie—an anecdote, something I’ve read, something funny that happened on a trip. Lorrie has discovered that I become a better talker when she gets me out of the house and into the fresh air. When we take a hike or walk together, she says, it’s easier to engage me in conversation.
We also try to have regular date nights, and we make a point of dressing up, rather than wearing casual clothes all the time. It’s a way of showing respect; we’re not taking each other for granted.
Lorrie likes me to make the reservations once in a while so I’m not always leaving it to her to be the social secretary. And when we go out, she wants to have a real dinner conversation.
“Sully is a man of few words,” Lorrie tells her friends. “So I tell him to save up his words for date night.”
LORRIE SAYS that part of what makes me a good pilot is my attention to detail. She has told me: “Sully, you expect a lot from yourself and those around you. You’re in control. That helps you as a pilot. But those aren’t always good husband qualities. Sometimes I need a companion who is more forgiving and less of a perfectionist.”
I know I can be exasperating to Lorrie. “Sully,” she has said more than once, “life is not a checklist!”
I understand her frustration, but I don’t see myself that way. I’m organized. I’m not a robot.
She says that when we go on vacation, I choreograph things with military precision, from loading the trunk to the time of departure. “That makes sense if you’re flying a hundred fifty passengers to some vacation destination,” she tells me. “But if you’re just packing our suitcases into the car for a family getaway, it’s not necessary.”
My response to her: “That’s confirmation bias. You find things that confirm your point of view, and you ignore evidence to the contrary.”
In my heart, of course, I know she has a valid point.
In some important ways, my profession as a pilot is easier for me than relationships are. I can control an airplane and make it do what I want it to do. I can learn all of its component systems and understand how they work in every circumstance. Piloting is well defined, with a process that is predictable and understandable to me. Relationships, on the other hand, are more ambiguous. There’s a good deal of nuance, and it’s not always obvious what the right answer is.
In the twenty years of our marriage, we’ve had our share of bumps in the road. At certain points, one of us would be working harder at the relationship than the other, and then it would flip-flop. We weren’t always equally committed to addressing issues. That has been an impediment at times.
Lorrie describes herself as “the voice raiser, the emotional one.” I’m easily frustrated, often tired from traveling. And the fact that I’m always packing up to leave doesn’t help. Marriage counselors advise couples not to go to bed angry. It’s also not a good idea to fly across the country angry, leaving an unhappy spouse at home.
“For me, absence does not make the heart grow fonder,” Lorrie says. She stopped working at PSA a long time ago, and has spent most of her energy since then as an at-home mom. She would love to have a husband who comes home every evening. “We could have a glass of wine, eat dinner together, chat about our day,” she says. “And I don’t even need the wine or the meal. I just want the husband in the room with me.” She and I have nice phone conversations when I’m on the road. “It’s not the same as having you here,” she tells me.
In some ways, it was worse when the kids were younger, because back then Lorrie wanted my hands-on help. For a while we had two in diapers and in car seats, and she felt overwhelmed when I left on a long trip. Sometimes, she’d be in tears as we said our good-byes. In her PSA days, she had once gotten to sit in a flight simulator. “I know the flap settings,” she’d tell me. “I’ll get the plane off the ground. You stay home with two crying babies for four days.” She was joking, but…
Now that the kids are older, she says that when I return home after a four- or five-day absence, my reentry to family life isn’t always smooth. I’m jet-lagged, I’m out of the loop of family activities. I’ve missed a lot. Lorrie says it sometimes takes me a day and a half before I can give something back to the relationship. I’m in the house, but I’m not able to jump back into our normal routine with the same vigor. Sometimes I’m just feeling spent, and not eager to attend to household chores.
I do see myself at times as somewhat of an outsider in my own family. But I love that the girls connect so well with Lorrie, and I understand why my bonds with them are not as effortless. I get it: I’m more formal, I’m male, I’m older, I’m gone a lot.
Parents build up a bank account of interactions and memories with their children. Lorrie has had a lot more moments with the kids than I have, so her bank balance with the girls is higher than mine. Certainly, there’s a lot of love between me and the girls, but I know I have handicaps that I have to work to overcome.
My time away is a challenge. But Lorrie and I have been through great challenges together, and we have spent twenty years working through them. We work hard to find the right balance. We have both learned a lot about ourselves and each other and about what it takes to make a relationship work and to make it rewarding. We have both grown. By working on this together for each other and for our girls, we have become better people. We have invested in ourselves.
HOW DID my personal life, apart from my aviation experiences, prepare me for that journey to the Hudson?
