What you know 'When you know you know.'

PART TWO OF 'WHY I WAITED 22 YEARS TO GET MARRIED.' THREE MORE EXCELLENT REASONS.

In Part 1 of “Why I Waited 22 Years to Get Married”, when we last left our heroine, which is how I have decided to refer to myself for absolutely no reason, I had just explained the huge effect that ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife’ (which came in as Reason #3) had on me. Now we move on to the residual-effects of having taken an assortment of psychology classes in college, talked for 8 years to a very brilliant therapist, observed a lot of scary marriages and listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell.

REASON #4: The Inherent Dangers of The Chocolate Easter Bunny

I used to carry a neatly folded newspaper article in my wallet, stashed next to my social security card. I clipped it out of the L.A. Times in April 1992 and continued carrying it until the paper it was printed on turned yellow and disintegrated. It contained a bold-faced headline that read:

The above is from the online L.A.Times archive..

The article continues: “Her spouse of more than 30 years, Paul Franklin Carter, 62, was taken to the burn unit at UCI Medical Center in Orange, where he was listed in serious condition.” This THIRTY YEAR marriage was not the result of a childish whim. June was 40 plus when she tied the knot.

So much for judging the success of a marital union based on longevity of the relationship.

The rest of the article goes on to explain, with a bit more nuance, that “The incident may have been the result of a long-standing fight. According to police, June and Paul Carter have quarreled repeatedly over his habit of eating sweets and snacks that she intended for herself.” The article was filed the day before Easter, which was on April 19 in 1992.

“Maybe he had been ill for a very long time and things just emotionally caught up with her,” said Police Lt. Robert Helton. “Something as insignificant as eating a chocolate Easter bunny could have been the catalyst that set her off.” The awful truth appears to be that in marriage, apparently ANYTHING can be a last straw.

“She decided to punish him because he had eaten her chocolate Easter bunny,” said Maureen Haacker, a Santa Ana police spokeswoman to the L.A.Times reporter, “She apparently doused him with rubbing alcohol, lit a match and threw it at him. She told officers that she then left for the store because she was still very angry.” Fingers crossed the store where she was headed still had a few of the chocolate bunnies she liked best in stock.

So let’s review.
At some point, June and Paul Carter were a young couple in love. They got married and probably invited friends and family to a celebration so everyone could share in their joy. Undoubtedly someone took a photo of them kissing and everyone applauded. People kept complimenting them on how good they looked together and how happy they seemed. Friends of her’s wanted to know how she met such a wonderful guy, so kind and caring, so attentive and attractive! Maybe she answered with homilies like “It can happen when you least expect it.” Friends of his told him he was a lucky man. They seemed like such a good match.
Of course, all that was before she noticed how often he was eating her candy.

To be fair, back when they were falling madly in love and talking about spending forever together, the subject of candy consumption never came up. They probably should have talked about it before they tied the knot. But there was so much to take care of. They probably got busy.

“How soon after you met him did you know he was the man you wanted to marry?” her friends may have asked her. “I knew right away,” she probably said,“There was something about him. Something in his eyes that pulled me in. When you know you know.”

REASON # 5: What you know ‘When you KNOW you KNOW”

If you date enough people, at some point you will have the experience of being attracted to someone you don’t even like. This can be rendered very confusing if you grew up taking song lyrics about love seriously. For instance: ““It’s In His Kiss.”

Kiss him and squeeze him tight
And find out what you want to know
If it's love, if it really is
It's there in his kiss

Which brings us to an important pre-marital dilemma: How can you be sure that the one you are kissing is someone you are never going to want to set on fire?

I have often heard people cite the homily that ‘When you know, you know.” because they apparently believe that there is an inborn intuitive wisdom in the gut reaction that takes control of a person when a relationship is ‘meant to be’. It feels so primal that it is easy to conclude that those feelings are plugged directly into fate.

But in the name of logical analysis, if it please the court, I now submit the example of Doreen Lioy, the woman who married Richard Ramirez, a terrifying serial killer in the 1980’s known as The Night Stalker. Doreen set out to meet him after he was already in prison awaiting trial for a long list of grizzly offenses including eye gouging and raping an eighty-year-old woman. But, as Doreen later told an interviewer, from the moment she saw his mug shot on a news broadcast reporting his arrest, she knew he was the one.

“The turning point for me was when police broke into “Dallas”, which was the biggest TV show at that time.” she recalled wistfully, in an interview in the L.A.Times, “When they put up a picture of his mug shot, there was something in his eyes that captivated me.  Something pulled me in. Maybe the vulnerability, I’m not sure.”  To re-cap, she is still talking about the vulnerability she saw in the mug shot of a man who was convicted of raping an eighty-year-old woman and gauging out her eyes.

Which brings us back to “When you know, you know. “ Because, in my research into this premise, few people are surer that when they know, they know, than the women who meet and later marry convicted murderers after they are already in prison. The women who date convicted murderers would be the first ones to tell you that you have to trust your gut feelings because it happens for these women almost as quickly as it does for the female frigate bird during their mating season.

From the git-go, the frigates are ahead of the game because they have their own whole mating SEASON. So when it’s their time, the male frigate birds signal that the mating has begun by inflating a bright red elastic pouch that they have stored under their beak, on their throat, like a big red balloon. This allows them to sashay into their special mating arena, during their personal mating season, with the confidence of knowing they have the perfect equipment to meet the season’s exacting demands. After all, they have known, since puberty, that the red balloon pouch was a slam-dunk because the eligible lady frigate birds are all like “WOW. That is a fantastic red balloon pouch! HE is a PARTY that I need to attend.”  And by the way, when the lady frigate birds say they know, they DO know. There is no chance of a misunderstanding. They need not contemplate, for even a second, the larger socio-economic implications of whether the jeans worn by their chosen one are cuffed, bootcut, skinny or high-waisted. No! Every female frigate bird alive has the red balloon pouch money-back guarantee!  When you’re a frigate bird, and you think you know, you actually DO know.

Now let’s contrast that with the way at least one female human being was able to interpret the mating instincts that came bundled with her equipment at birth by again returning to the case of Doreen Lioy, Mrs. Night Stalker. “If you can find the nurturing side of yourself, as I believe I have, and if you can find the right person to receive that part of you, that unconditional love and commitment, then it is the perfect marriage."is another one of her quotes in that same L.A.Times interview. She is still talking about her union with a man convicted of killing fifteen people, who got nineteen (19!) death sentences. “I’ll never forget the first time we touched. It was one of those defining moments.” she continued, “I sort of fell into his arms softly and, yes, gently. I visited him four times a week. I was always the first in line. And I always packed breath mints so I would be able to kiss with confidence.”

Credit where credit is due: She may not have been incorrect in assuming it was a good idea not to offend a man who killed nineteen people with your sour breath, even after you know what you know.

‘When you know,you know” is also how it started for Dagmar Polzin, a waitress in Germany, who describes the day she decided to get in touch with Bobby Lee Harris, a North Carolina man with an IQ of 75, who was on death row for stabbing his boss to death during a robbery on a shrimp boat. “I was waiting at a bus stop in Hamburg when I saw a picture of him on a Benneton anti-death penalty poster.” She tells an interviewer, “It was something in his eyes. There was this remorse, this sadness. I knew he was the one. I could tell.” Perhaps he just had an adverse reaction to shrimp!

Ditto for Anna Sandhu, who met James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King, while she was working as a courtroom artist and drawing his picture. “When I’m drawing someone, it’s like I can read their mind.” She said, of their first encounter,” He had the most direct gaze of any man I’d ever known.” For Anna, it was almost as if James Earl Ray had expanded a big red pouch under his beak. “I know him and he’s not a man who is capable of murder.” continues Anna, describing the man who murdered Martin Luther King, “I told him that to be in love with him, it’s not the easiest road to take. But at least I know it's the right one. “

“It’s like something that happened to me without my permission, without any warning” explains ‘Janet’, a woman who agreed to be interviewed for the book “Women Who Love Men Who Kill” about her relationship with a man she met thru a prisoner pen-pal site. For some mysterious reason, she declined to give her full name. “We looked up at the same time and it was like WHAM. An electrical charge. A jolt.” She continues,“They claim he forced a young woman into his car, tied her up and assaulted her. But he gives me what no man has ever given me. That communication. That heart connection.” Because, let’s face it, one thing she knows she knew right at WHAM was that when you know, you know.

“Sometimes I wonder if we have any control over who we love. .” Said Sandy, another woman hiding her last name while being interviewed for the same book, about falling in love with a prison inmate. “Seems like it arrives in our lives unbidden.”

These women not only had no doubts, they were all able to look past detailed confessions of murderous behavior. But here’s what they probably did NOT know: That apparently women who fall in love with convicted killers have a high statistical probability of being from a home where there was domestic violence. The big “you know” that clicks in to place and arrives “in your life unbidden” may be coming straight from your unconscious, born as part of the weird adjustments you had to make as a child to daily life with a violent parent.

This is known as repetition compulsion. Sometimes called trauma re-enactment.

Repetition compulsion is the fatal flaw in the old ‘when you know, you know.” A simplified explanation is that whatever you got used to coping with as a non-judgmental child, including abuse, remains the thing you continue to find ‘attractive’. The thing that ‘pulls you in’. So when you run into a version of it in the real world, especially in the form of a sexy human, the relationship feels familiar, like home.

You might think its a gut level connection to an inevitable soul mate. But nope… it may just be your lurking abuser-ghost whispering, thru waves of inexplicable electromagnetism, “Welcome back! Good to see you! I hope you have enough time to stick around for some abuse.”

To re-peat: That cute someone in athleisure wear or vegan leather who materializes across the room at a social event, looking for all intents and purposes like a shimmering glimmering vision from the heavens, may be just an alternate form of your most problematic relative who, by the way, never had a clue about what they were doing wrong in terms of your upbringing because they were only seventeen when you were born. Repetition compulsion is one of the dirtiest tricks psychology knows how to play.

And this will happen over and over and over until you become aware of it. And even then, awareness only offers you the option of saying “Are you kidding? Not this again.”

I guess in a best-case scenario, repetition compulsion could also lead to eventual mastery of whatever the attracting problem was. And if you come from a childhood where everything was great, you will probably be seeking another version of greatness. But come on:how often does anyone get a best case scenario? (answer: not often.) Think about that friend of yours who has married two alcoholics in a row. I know you have a friend like that. Everyone has a friend like that. (Unless I got your two friends by mistake. If you need them back, give me plenty of notice.)

I don’t know whose idea it was to set the human brain up this way. Maybe Mother Nature took the human being out of beta too quickly. Whatever the reason, I feel pretty sure that Mother Nature never imagined that by the twenty first century, the human instruction manual that she designed to come bundled into every new human being, would be so corrupted and unreadable that human beings would wind up with nothing to rely in terms of mating instincts besides the weak hope that the photo someone posted on their Social Media wasn’t hacked from someone else’s social media, photo-shopped by AI and put on line by men in Mumbai hoping to grab access to functioning credit cards.

I know. Time for a scream break.

Aaaagggghhhhh.

That was refreshing.

By the way, these are not the kind of problems the frigate bird ever has to worry about.  Even if a lady frigate accidentally picks a questionable red ballooner, she knows she only has to hang out with him for as long as the sex act lasts. She doesn’t even have to offer the object of her affection a friendly post-balloon- grilled cheese sandwich and a beer.

Meanwhile, in the same exact situation, if things have gone well, a human female might already be concluding that she should try to make this relationship last a lifetime. She is feeling so many confusing hormonal stimulants coursing thru her body and has logged so many judgmental cultural edicts about how she is supposed to behave that she wakes up in the middle of the night to re-apply her makeup so she doesn’t look too smudgy for her poorly chosen new love interest in the morning.

Later in life, after the relationship has deconstructed in a torrent of horrid behavior, as it was always fated to do, the inability to decode the repetition compulsion is often the reason human beings with a need for answers have to pay a lot of money to a shrink.

This brings me to the essence, the brass tacks of Reason # 5, which, for me, boiled down to “HOW DO I TO PREVENT MYSELF FROM MARRYING MY MOTHER?”

REASON #6: THE CURSE OF JONI MITCHELL AND THE PIECE OF PAPER FROM THE CITY HALL.

When I was in college, I relied on the songs of Joni Mitchell to guide me thru my most layered emotional milestones. Her lyrics about love informed my behavior the way young women now find road maps inside the lyrics of Taylor Swift. I totally get that. There would have been plenty of identity for the college version of me to draw from Taylor Swift. For example, her song ‘Anti Hero’.

“It’s me. Yeah. I’m the problem, it’s me. I’ll stare directly in the sun but never in the mirror. It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti hero.”

I clearly remember the good old days when I was able to see being the problem as a badge of authenticity. As in “Yeah, maybe I’m the problem. But at least I’m not a colorless brain dead robot, like you.”

But I didn’t call you here today for yet another discussion of Taylor Swift. No…I am here to talk about Joni Mitchell.

When I think back on my original struggles of forming an identity, it’s mainly my graduate school years in the art department at UC Berkeley in the seventies that I revisit. That was a version of me who was so intoxicated by Marcel Duchamps and Rene Magritte that I woke up every morning hoping to find an opportunity to start reassigning new names to toilets and pipes.

Also it’s worth noting that at that point in the early 1970’s, there were almost no women being mentioned in the teaching of art history. Though I was already some version of a women’s rights champion, I didn’t really question the absence of women in art history. I kind of suspected that maybe women had to own this omission as our own fault for not having tried harder or something. Only decades later did I learn that actually lots of excellent professional women artists existed throughout art history but were systematically left off of lists by the men who kept the historical records. In a related story, I was aware that the girls in the art department were referred to, behind our backs, as “dumb chick artists.” So I knew it was important to try to separate myself from this maligned stereotype. No way they could call me a dumb chick artist because I was…well, definitely not that. Not me. I hadn’t really done much analysis into how all my role models in the Bay Area art world were men who dressed like a ranch hands, rolled their own cigarettes, drank straight shots of whisky and played in big all male poker games. I tried to identify with them because they were kind of fun to imitate, even though I was never any good at smoking, drinking or poker.

 In graduate school, I shared the bottom half of a 1950’s duplex in Oakland with a fellow grad student named Julie. It was a railroad flat of sorts with little back yard. When you walked in our front door, the first thing you saw was a large woven rug emblazoned with an image of a moose. And if you took a few more steps, you came to a book shelf upon which there was a small aquarium containing our two fish, Don Guralnick and Wendy Kaufman, names we randomly selected from the Oakland telephone book. Below Don and Wendy was a portable turntable, on which, more than likely, ‘Blue’ by Joni Mitchell was playing.  From the moment the album came out in 1971, we listened to it endlessly. We wished we had a river we could skate away on.

I was clueless about a lot of things but one thing I knew for certain: everything Joni was suggesting was more emotionally evolved than the hollow cacophony of confusing crap I had ricocheting around in my head in the voices of my parents and teachers. Maybe I was a girl who had to pretend to be a ranch hand during the day, but that didn’t keep me from wishing ‘I had a river so long it could teach my feet to fly.’ I was determined to buy the premise that Joni was singing about my life.

 What I wished for even more than access to a frozen river, was the ability to look simultaneously serene yet sexual, smart yet wistful, fragile yet sturdy, symmetrical yet off-center, complicated yet simple and filled with intelligent pain, like Joni. Who wouldn’t want to be beautiful, blonde and effortlessly graceful, ethereal, haunted and all-knowing in the best possible way? I figured that once I was able to get all that stuff working for me, if someone decided to throw in a frozen river that I could skate away on as a bonus, I wouldn’t turn it down. Maybe someone I met down by the river would have a few minutes available to teach me to skate.

In a way, I feel lucky to have had Joni as a model instead of Taylor because although Joni was physically perfect in ways to which were absolutely off the table for me, she was definitely easier to aspire to physically than the confident, long-limbed dancing machine in a glittering one piece bathing suit that is Taylor Swift. Joni, in all black, with a black beret, a matching jacket and boots, was much more do-able.

Of course, I didn’t want to give too much thought to the obvious truth-- that Joni was basically my diametric opposite.   I was dark and goofy, messy, gloomy, cynical and physically awkward. She had those cheekbones and teeth. I did not. Also a beret looked flat and weird on my head, like an omelet.

And then there was the fact that Joni and I definitely had vastly different options when it came to dating.  She had her pick of an endless assortment of handsome, famous musicians with long tangled hair, deep, inquisitive eyes and inscrutable, all-knowing faces. I knew from reading Rollingstone that she talked about them in her songs, in code. I wasn’t sure which one was ‘the rambler and the gambler’ or which one was ‘the sweet-talking lady’s man’, but I was right there with her on wanting to ‘knit them a sweater and write them a love letter to make them feel better.’ Because one thing Joni and I were both determined to do was allow all the men we adored to feel free. Freeeee. 

 Though, to be honest, I had a few unanswered questions about how that was supposed to work, in real life. Free like how? Free like if they left and you only heard from them a couple of times a year, you didn’t mind because love is eternal and needs no explanation? I’d heard the homily,“If you love something, set it free?’ but my overly logical brain could think of so many examples of where that simply didn’t work. Like with my dogs, who I definitely loved. If I set them free, how in hell was that ever going to play out for the best?

Then again, Joni’s version of free was a smarter, deeper version than mine. She meant free like in “A Free Man in Paris.” If you are unfamiliar with the song, (which was apparently written about David Geffen) “(He) was unfettered and alive.” Now that was the right kind of free. And an important reminder to regularly check to make sure I was not inadvertently accumulating too many fetters.

Not everything Joni sang confused me. “Oh, I am a lonely painter, I live in a box of paints” was almost too easy for me to identify with since I was, after all, in my fifth year of art school. But the pinnacle of all this, the life changing anchor of Joni’s lessons about love, came to me in her song: ‘My Old Man’. It was a song that seemed to contain everything I was going to need to remember in my long-term relationships going forward.

Naturally I had a little homework to do. To start, I needed to teach myself how to speak the phrase “my old man” like Joni did, without wincing. Even back then, it hit me as the kind of hippie slang that was too embarrassing to speak out loud. (see also: Groovy)  But look: if Joni could say ‘my old man’ with impunity, then I would do my best to learn.

After that came the most profound and life changing of all her lyrical edicts. When Joni sang (about maybe Graham Nash?) “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall, keepin’ us tied and true,” the air tight logic of that line resonated with me so hard that for decades I considered trying to use it as a way to get out of jury duty. Because that was so us: Me and Joni. The last thing Joni and I needed was no piece of paper from the city hall. Seriously.

We just wanted to knit you a sweater. And write you a love letter. We wanted to make you feel better. We wanted to make you feel freeeeeeeeeee.