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

Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату