My 30th birthday, Even More Weird History of Marriage, Bad Husband Anecdotes and Elevator Problems.

PART 4 of WHY I WAITED 22 YEARS TO GET MARRIED.

As you may or may not know by now, when I got married a few years ago, I was filled with so much anxiety (even after being in a successful and happy 22 year relationship with my now husband!) that I thought it was worthwhile to dissect the reasons behind all my marital terror. What cultural detritus was working on me exactly? Reasons number 1-3 are here. Reasons number 4-6 are here. Reasons number 7-10 are here. And now, in this the fourth installment, I proudly present reasons #11-15. Gotta say…I think I have some EXCELLENT reasons. Maybe everyone should wait 22 years before getting married. (If you’re thinking of jumping in to matrimony, hang on. A fifth installment is coming!)

REASON #11: A TOAST

Let’s start with a story about what passed for festive optimism in my family of origin.

On my thirtieth birthday, my parents and I went out to dinner. We met at a middle eastern restaurant in San Francisco that I had picked because it had vegetarian-friendly menu options. I don’t remember what I ordered. Probably something involving pita bread since eating some kind of warm bread on special occasions was always the highest level of dietary pleasure for me. As a girl who had been on a self-imposed bread-restricted weight loss diet since the age of eight, bread was for special occasions only.

So, there we sat, the three of us, in a nicely appointed but very dark room. It was kind of the minimum definition of festive. There was a candle burning at every table, but the darkness of the room is why I remember that my mother was wearing her prescription sunglasses, something she only did when she wanted to ‘disguise’ the fact that she had been crying. However, her disguise did the opposite of that since there was no other reason she would be wearing sunglasses in a very dark room. They also added the kind of theatrical element that my mother liked best: subtle yet impossible to ignore.

I confess that I wondered whether the dark glasses in the dark restaurant were her way of sharing the birthday spotlight, which I would have happily shared. From first grade on, I never felt comfortable hogging the birthday spotlight. That was the first time my parents asked the wait-staff of a family-style restaurant to gather around our table and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. That was also the day I realized that the birthday spotlight was always going to bring something uncomfortable and
embarrassing.

The upshot of all this was that birthdays made me nervous. I would have preferred to skip past them, without a mention but it was too late for that now. Especially on my thirtieth birthday: a negative landmark for women since it heralded the beginning of your upcoming decrepitude. Whatever you intended to take care of in terms of attractiveness or fertility had better be a fait accompli before you faced down thirty..

Anyway, as my birthday proceeded forward, a bottle of champagne was ordered for the table. A waiter un-corked it and poured. My mother picked up her glass...or flute, as she always called it. She held it aloft, not by the stem but by the base, as was her preference. Then she said “I’d like to propose a toast.”My Dad and I raised our glasses.

“To my daughter on her birthday...” said my mother, as though she was performing a Shakespearean reading. I waited nervously for her to finish her thought.“May half of all your dreams come true” she said with a flourish. It was another of those moments where I had no idea what the appropriate facial expression should be.

“Really, Mom?” I said, after a pause, “Only half? Why not all? I mean, a toast is just an imaginary wish. It’s make-believe.”
“Half is a very good percentage” my mother said, matter of factly. And then we all sipped our champagne.

REASON # 12: THE LADY OR THE BUSHEL OF GRAIN?

Sometimes it’s useful to trace a tradition back to its origins to find your place within it. And sometimes, when you do, it gives you pause.

The earliest marriages were not a Holy Union Blessed by God. They also had nothing at all to do with falling in love. The church didn’t even bother involving itself with officiating marriages until after the Roman empire collapsed in 476. And it wasn’t until 1215 that they started to collect enough money from doing it to add marriage to the list of the seven sacraments, where it still resides today, alongside rites like baptism and penance, two other things that I have steadfastly avoided.

The first recorded evidence of marriage contracts dates to 4,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia where marriage was a business arrangement between the male heads of households who wanted to forge an alliance with another family and solidify their property holdings. In the language of the ancient Sumerians, the word for `love’ was literally a compound verb that meant `to mark off land’.

In them days, a virgin daughter was a valuable part of a man’s financial portfolio. She was up near the top of his list of holdings, beside other saleable assets like farm animals, tillable soil and bushels of grain. If a Dad could throw a virgin daughter into a difficult negotiation, it was a nice little extra boost to help seal the deal… like a car dealer throwing in free floor mats with the purchase of a new car.

For thousands of years, marriage meant that the man who agreed to take a daughter off someone’s hands was rewarded with either a dowry or a bride price, then put legally in charge of the woman herself. In a marriage, a Dad was actually transferring ownership of his daughter, the bride, to the groom. The wedding ceremony officiated that legal transfer. Like going to the DMV when you turn 18.

In the middle ages, the size of a woman’s dowry remained the biggest reason for joining any two people together. This exciting and profitable handing-over of grains, livestock and daughters in exchange for undeveloped land would have seemed like a God send to my father, who was a builder. I can hear him chuckling, “So you’re saying you take her off my hands AND I ALSO get property AND grain? Pinch me. I must be dreaming. Do I meet this guy before the wedding? No? Well, how soon can I start to develop the land?”

In all kinds of ancient marriage laws, women were not allowed to own property because women were property. And this idea of keeping women from owning property turned out to be so popular with the citizens of everywhere (men) that it was replicated in multiple cultures on multiple continents throughout most of the centuries! That’s the beauty of a great idea: It is ageless and timeless!

Meanwhile, in most of these original recipe systems of law, the brand-new wife, who was probably in her early teens (if the prospective husband liked older women) could be held responsible for all her husband’s debts. And if that weren’t reward enough for any dewy-eyed bride, if the blessed newly-weds had any daughters, when the family patriarch was hard up for cash he could sell the girls into slavery. Why, they were practically as useful as pocket change!

Of course, the core truth of many marriages was that one of the main reasons a man even wanted a damn wife to begin with was she was a necessary conduit to sons. In fact, the failure of a wife to produce a son was one of the first universally endorsed reasons for granting a man a divorce.

Over time, as the church began to involve itself with marriage, everyone’s favorite church dogma about pleasure being sinful began to spread. Wives were warned to be a passive recipient and not to enjoy themselves where sex was concerned. This was a commandment for which every English- speaking stand-up comedian of the 1950s and 60’s owes an enormous debt of gratitude since 80% of the jokes that were written back then were rooted in this wife-as-unresponsive- during-sex-act premise.

When I was coming of age, there was a lot of talk back then about “frigid” women. Of course this idea was actually invented by men. For example, Thomas Aquinas warned specifically that a man who slept with his wife solely for pleasure was treating her like a prostitute. I’m sure it never occurred to Mr. Aquinas that he was accidentally suggesting a kink that lives on to this very day.

Marriage didn’t take on its present high-minded, if foreboding, tone until they added the words of Jesus into the ceremony: “What God hath brought together, let no man put asunder.” This provided the ceremony with a sentiment that was both overwhelming as well as utterly void of any specifics about God’s ideas for who he thinks belongs with who. It’s main function, all these years later, has been to provide the one and only appropriate usage for the word ASUNDER.

It wasn’t until the late Roman Republic that the idea of that a marital partnership having some kind of connection to mutual affection began to take root. Meanwhile, the wife didn’t have to worry her pretty little head about solving any of her relationship complaints because in most instances, no matter what country or continent she lived in or religion she practiced, she wasn’t allowed to initiate a divorce. She was stuck right where she was, and no matter how miserable, was expected to provide a veritable Home-Depot-aisle worth of goods and services for her new husband/owner.

She was in charge of tending livestock, making butter. preparing meals, milking cows, growing the vegetable garden, fetching water, doing laundry at the stream, spinning and sewing, nursing babies, caring for the sick and the elderly, and in the time she had left over, helping in the fields with hoeing, weeding, and harvesting. She was even responsible for gleaning. I don’t know what that is. I am afraid to look it up.

In some cultures, she was almost acknowledged for all her endless labors, though it was more like damning with faint praise. In the Chinese alphabet, the characters for “Good Wife’ translate literally to “Great Domestic Assistant”. And once you joined the rank of these ‘Good Wives/Great Domestic Assistants’, you lived by the “Three Obedience’s”. This meant that you were supposed to “obey your father before marriage, your husband when married and your sons in widowhood.” That’s a lot to ask of even a mediocre domestic assistant. And no reprieve for the lucky gals who had immature, annoying or even sociopathic or sadistic fathers, husbands and sons. It would probably not surprise anyone to find out that was most of them.

To make matters a little more controllable, Chinese men usually had only one wife. And to make matters a lot less controllable, they were allowed to have as many courtesans as they could afford. The average man had only a few dozen, (if he remembered to get up early and shop on Black Friday.) But an Emperor could have ten thousand, no problem. So, it became the responsibility of the ‘Wife/Great Domestic Assistant’ to care not only for her husband, his family, and their children, but also the twenty-four or, in a few cases, ten thousand courtesans who were invited to live permanently in the family home. If you think that sounds like a dream come true for these good Chinese wives/Great Domestic Assistants, hold on: There’s more!

it was grounds for divorce if that lucky Wife/Great domestic assistant showed any jealousy toward her husband’s concubines. That meant she was headed straight to a particularly horrible pit in hell reserved especially for Good Wives /Great Domestic Assistants with these unseemly issues.

My guess is that for many of these Good Wives/Great Domestic Assistants, it seemed totally worth it to risk an eternity of whatever was in that horrible pit knowing that it was definitely going to be an improvement over the torture of performing the services of a Great Domestic Assistant for your husband’s multiple girlfriends.

REASON #13: My History of Hasty Decisions.

During my formative years, by which I mean the ones in which I interacted daily with my very critical parents, it was continuously pointed out to me that I was prone to making bad decisions. According to them, I rarely failed to choose the wrong shoes, get the wrong haircut and select the wrong thing for dinner every single time. Yet pointing out to them that the ability to be that consistently wrong about every single thing every single time could also be considered an impressive skill unto itself did not seem to gain me much traction.

   This led me to a general terror of speaking up for my own preferences, knowing that they would be scrutinized with pursed lips, and sighs of disappointment or derisive laughter. Small wonder it began to seem like a smart idea to put off making decisions wherever I could.

 I do not fully believe the concept of the universe as a school, though it is an idea that I like and support because life seems more manageable if it is viewed as imposing a workable structure on what appears to be an infinite amount of chaos.  So I promised myself that I would remember the lessons taught to me by my biggest missteps and by doing so transform what would have been breadcrumb trails left by an idiot into moments of great value.

Bad Decision # 1: THE PARABLE OF THE ELEVATOR

The Parable of the Elevator

The spiral started immediately after I completed a successful job interview on the 10^th floor of an old 1930’s Art Deco office building in Hollywood. The building interior was an interesting blend of charming vintage architectural details juxtaposed with numerous haunted-looking potential Diane Arbus photo staging areas . If ever identical twins in party dresses were going to show up anywhere, it would be here.

Things had gone so well at the interview, I had a bounce in my step on my return trip to the elevator bank. I’d just been offered a new job so I was happily re-playing the job interview highlights in my head as I pushed the button with the down arrow. Had I said anything funny I could pat myself on the back for? Did I collect any compliments? I was so self-absorbed I paid no attention to the metallic clunking sounds that the machinery of the elevator was making as it hauled the car up to my floor.

While I waited, I looked out the dirty round Art Deco window beside the small dusty end table a few feet away, on my left. I remember this vividly because what I saw outside was unusual for Los Angeles: a serious down-pour accompanied by occasional flashes of lightening and claps of thunder. My mind began to visualize the ordeal I was destined to face, running four blocks in the pounding rain to my parking meter, my purse on top of my head like a badly designed rain hat. Ruining my new boots in deep puddles was literally ALL I was thinking about when the elevator car arrived.

When the doors opened, I stared straight ahead, as blank as a boiled potato. I barely listened to a loud new rumble of thunder while I sleep-walked into that car. I was on auto pilot, not cognizant enough to identify any of my robotic actions as actual decisions. I barely made a facial expression as the elevator motor began to hum and I watched the doors close.

Then I heard the mechanical equivalent of a big deep elevator sigh. And…all the lights in the building went out. I was alone in a silence and a darkness so dense I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Though I also felt gratitude that I did not have the additional problem of having to share that pitch-black elevator with a dodgy stranger .

Obviously there was only one path to rescue and that was going to involve me shouting ‘HELP!” and hoping that someone on another floor, in one of the offices, had wandered down the hall to see if the elevators were still working. But when I bellowed “Help!” I was alarmed at how small and weak, how thin and powerless my voice sounded. Even at full blast, I sounded like I was 8 inches tall. (And don’t you start with “Didn’t you have your phone with you?” because this was the 1990’s. All phones were still attached to walls. Sure, there were ‘walkie-talkies’ but unless you were in the army, working for Amtrac or part of the crew on a film shoot, you probably weren’t carrying one.) There was nothing to do besides stand there, alone, in the dark.

And while I did, a new line of obsessive thinking took hold: I started seeing those few minutes BEFORE I’d casually pushed that button with the downward facing arrow as idyllic and filled with amazing opportunities. Those last few moments back on the tenth floor suddenly seemed like the happiest, most perfect moments of my life, encased as they were in a fluffy pink cloud of safety. Why had I not appreciated them more? Would I ever know such wonderful, idyllic, purely joyous moments full of pure rapture and infinite choices again? I could have boarded a plane for the Caribbean. Or enrolled in an undergraduate medical degree program. My current predicament had only happened because I was daydreaming when I should have been making plans. I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the possible consequences of pushing that down arrow button. I had no one to blame for this situation but myself.

“You were two feet from a window, looking out at the pouring rain.” I berated myself, “You saw the flash of lightning. You heard the clap of thunder. You were only six feet from a door labeled STAIRS. But did you put two and two together? No, you did not.”

 Trapped in that dangling elevator, I now became afraid to move, lest I shift my weight toward the wrong spot and somehow trigger a free fall. What were the recommended protocols for being trapped in an elevator anyway? Why had I never looked them up?

I debated hoisting myself above the metal bar at the back of the car and trying to perch like a spider, flattened against the rear wall. It seemed to me that if I could somehow stay suspended, insect-like, above the floor, it might lessen my bone breakage if the car plummeted to the ground.

“This is completely on you. You could have taken the stairs.” I kept reminding myself, “From now on, you must remember to consider all the possible consequences of every decision.” Did that mean worrying about third degree burns every time I made a cup of coffee? Well, maybe it did! And suddenly the entire situation became a metaphor for every important decision of the future. ‘You have used up all the complementary dunderheaded moves that each of us receives, gratis, at birth.’ I said to myself, ' “From this point forward, there can be NO more mistakes.”

 When the five uniformed men from the fire department finally pried open the elevator doors with a crow bar, an hour later, I could now see that the car remained between the ninth and tenth floors. I made grateful, sheepish eye contact with each of the crew as they helped me climb a rope ladder the fifteen feet to the surface of the tenth floor. I was trying very hard to signal to each one of them that I was not a waste of tax-payers money. I was a nice person whose life had been well worth saving.  So I kept apologizing continuously, even though none of them appeared to be paying enough attention to register facially that they could hear me. They were probably just relieved to see there was only one middle-aged dumb-ass needing to be pulled out of this stupid malfunctioning elevator. And no armed six-year olds, like the one I read about who shot his teacher in Virginia a few weeks ago.

 And thus did I kick off three decades of analyzing and ruminating on the consequences of every decision as soon as it arose . Never again any crazy shit like in college where a car full of young men pulled up beside me on Telegraph avenue in Berkeley and when someone yelled at me “Would you like to go to a Buddhist meeting?”, I said, emphatically, ‘YES!” because I had been reading a lot of Jack Kerouac and felt it was important to embrace random life experiences fully. “ Let me just climb into your beat up car, packed full of male strangers that I have never laid eyes on in my life!” I apparently thought, “Oh, wait? There’s no room? Well, whose lap am I going to sit on?”

And thus did the malfunctioning elevator became my go-to metaphor for everything. I decided right then and there that any big life-changing decisions that I might ever have to make could contain NO obvious parallels to walking blindly into a badly maintained elevator. That definitely applied to marriage.

REASON # 14: PROBLEM HUSBAND EVENT HORIZON

I am pleased to report that as of this writing, I can think of seven six five married friends of mine whose marriages and husbands are working out okay. But even though I am down two since I wrote the first draft of this, six five is still a big change for me.
For a long time, all of my friends who were married seemed to have made a dreadful mistake. If some of these friends are reading this now and taking offense, please be advised that I definitely do not mean YOU.

The fact that I saw so many intelligent friends, with whom I closely identified, become trapped in the quicksand of untenable marital situations seemed to bode badly for me. If they had gotten sucked into a muculent abyss, why would I think I wouldn’t? Who was going to warn me that I was doing the equivalent ofblithely boarding another elevator during electrical storm? How could I be sure that the minute after I said ‘I do’ I would not start to punish myself for not realizing I’d been standing a foot away from a sign on a door that said STAIRS?

Exhibit A was my friend Cynthia, a fellow writer, a feminist and a friend. We spoke on the phone a lot and met for dinner at least once a month. She was the kind of savvy New Yorker connected to a big circle of people who had inside information on everything in the zeitgeist: fashion, news events, celebrities, entertainment, food, everything. The picture I am trying to draw for you is that the sprawling personal conversations I had with her on the regular gave me the impression that I knew what was going on in her life. Therefore, it startled me when I phoned her house one day and a man whose voice I did not recognize answered the phone.

“Hello? “I said, unable to disguise the surprise in my voice, “Is Cynthia there?” “Who’s this?” he said.
“Wait...who’s THIS?” I shot back, immediately starting to worry. “This is her husband” he answered quickly, “Who are YOU?” “Her friend,” I said,” Can I speak to her?” “About what?” he replied. “Can you just put her on the phone?” I asked.
“I don’t like your attitude” he said. Then he hung up on me.

As I sat there staring, my heart was pounding. I had never encountered anything before that made me this worried about the safety of a friend in her own home. Was she being held hostage? How could she suddenly have a husband without any previous mention that she was even dating someone seriously? And not just a husband but one who apparently now was in charge of which phone calls she could take. When had she decided to get married to someone who thought it was a good idea to pick a fight with one of her friends for wanting to talk to her?

I didn’t hear from her for a couple of months after that, which was legitimately concerning. Although I did get an e- mail that indicated she was not a prisoner being held against her own will.

The next time I heard from her, a few weeks later, we met for dinner and everything seemed to be back to normal. “He was a nightmare” she said, when she finally spoke about him, “Very abusive.” Our friendship resumed as before. She never explained why she married him. I never laid eyes on him.

Exhibit B was the husband of another of my close friends, also a fellow writer. When she and I met in the ‘90’s, I liked her immediately because she was creative, funny, smart, interesting and successful. I didn’t meet her husband until a few months later, and was surprised to find him tedious, long winded and operating with a tenuous grasp of the obvious. Out of respect for my friend, I searched for other ways to bond with him. I knew he golfed a lot but I hated golf so that was a no. I was never sure what he did for a living. I heard he was some kind of a ‘producer’ but he had no track record. He seemed a puzzling choice for my brilliant friend.

“I don’t get it.” I said to myself whenever the three of us spent time together. “But it’s not important that I do. They have figured out something that works for them. And that is how love works. So… good for them!” I was, by now, well aware that where love and marriage were concerned, there is never a way to know who matches up with who. Maybe their emotional and intellectual differences balanced each other out like the scales of justice. Who was I to judge?

I continued to say these things to myself up until the day that she told me, seemingly out of the blue, that she had filed for a divorce. I was equally surprised to hear that he had hired a lawyer and was suing her for alimony and half of everything she owned. And after he successfully collected these things, he wiped out her savings completely.

“What did you ever love about him?” I finally asked her, as I watched her struggling and listened to stories about the spiritual events she was now attending as she tried to find a bigger more compelling way to see the world. “Not much” she replied. “So why did you want to marry him?” I asked her. “I never did,” she said, “It just sort of kept moving forward and I felt like couldn’t get out of it. I always knew it was wrong.”

Exhibit C, if it please the court, concerns the case of a woman my brother and I called Auntie, although she was really just a long-time family friend. She was a beautiful woman from the Midwest who had survived a lengthy but terrible marriage to a brutish bully. Then, in her sixties, she had re-encountered a guy named Jimmy, from her high school. They became smitten with each other and tied the knot.

She was ecstatically happy at first. But after they began a life together, she started to complain about him. He was, for sure, a big improvement over husband number one. But on numerous occasions it looked to everyone like she would probably leave him.

As it turned out, this never happened. He up-cut her exiting plans by dying first. Interestingly, as she came to grips with how his permanent departure had pre-empted her own, she began to re-evaluate everything about him. Now that he was gone, she reshuffled the deck and realized the great pride she felt in her successful second marriage. She found Jimmy to have been the ideal mate, a stellar husband and a wonderful man in all respects. This post mortem rewrite of history was a little confusing but who really understands love?

So on the anniversary of his death, when she decided to fly out from the Midwest to visit his grave, her son and I drove her to her husband’s final resting place. I stayed in the car while her son walked his mother over to her husband’s headstone. From a distance, I found it moving to see her lean her head into her son’s chest. He put his arm around her while they spoke.

Later that day, I asked him to share what his mother had been saying. “She said, ‘Oh Jimmy, why were you so mean to me?” he repeated. “THAT’S what she said to him at his grave?” I asked, ‘That’s ALL she had to say to the most wonderful husband in the world after not seeing him for over a year?”

This started me thinking about a very big question: What if horrible behavior was an essential component of a successful marriage? What if giving up your rights and suffering the consequences was literally what you were signing up for when you said ‘I do.’

‘Was it possible that my own mother made a mistake as well?’ I started to wonder. According to both of my parents, that marriage had been a huge success. In fact, my mother once told me that she and my father felt lucky to have found each other. And there was never talk of divorce. But the most common tone of voice between them seemed to be constant bickering and last-straw exasperation. About half of that explosive emotion pushed over in to flat-out yelling and the slamming of doors. The other half hid behind gastro intestinal ailments, skin eruptions and back pains. Which brings me to this coda.

Once, while I was enduring a painful breakup, my mother tried to comfort me with the following advice about finding new love: “Don’t worry.” she said, “You will meet someone else.” She paused. “Maybe he won’t be the handsomest man. Maybe he won’t be the smartest. He might not be the most interesting person in the world or earn the most money. But maybe he will love you. And that will be enough.”

I thought about this for a while, searching for wisdom in her words. ‘So, let me see if I understand what she is saying,’ I said to myself, ‘She is telling me that I might attract a man whose deficits are his most notable qualities. But for some reason, this man of few insights and many shortcomings has decided he loves me and wants to marry me. Okay. Now I just have one unanswered question: What is going to make me fall in love with this guy?”

Was my mother suggesting that I marry Richard Benjamin-as-Jonathan-Balser,(see part one, reason # 3) then just close my eyes and time travel during ‘a little old roll in de hay?’ OR, worse, was she describing her own reasoning when she decided to marry my father? Or, worse still, was she describing her vision of the best that I could reasonably expect, given the crippling shortcomings she observed in me when we were together?

I didn’t ask her these questions. But they haunted me for the rest of my life.

REASON # 15: ‘A comedy writer? Oh man. You are fucked.’

Along the way, the guy I’d been living with for 22 years went to a 12-step meeting. One of the other men, who was going through a tough time in his relationship with his wife, shared about how frustrating it was for him to fight with her. Whenever he thought he had a point to make, she would find a good way to refute it. By the end of the argument, this man felt humiliated because he always felt he had lost.

After the meeting, my beloved approached the guy to commiserate. “Brother, I feel for you” he said, “I have something similar. My girlfriend is a professional comedy writer.  She is paid to come up with wise ass comments about everything.”

The guy stared at him for a second, trying to comprehend. Then his eyes filled with dread.    “A professional comedy writer? ”  He said, “Man, you are fucked. You lost that fight before it began.” He stood there shaking his head, trying to imagine this horror. “She’s a professional comedy writer? That’s the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard.”