Married Longer Than We’ve Been Alive

I was sitting in one of those bookstore cafes when I noticed a tall, dark man in the distance browsing economics, and I thought to myself: Wow. I just felt attracted, you know?

Several seconds passed before I realized: That was no man; that was my husband.

There is probably no discovery on Earth happier than the realization that you are in love with the person you happen to be married to. It’s the kind of thing you don’t think about all the time. Especially if you’ve been married for 23 years.

Today is our anniversary. I can remember when “anniversary” meant how many months since we started “going together.” And I can remember thinking that people who were married 23 years were just plain old.

We have grown old together, but by staying together we will never grow old. I’ll always see in him the tall, dark boy who sat across from me in high school English and knew all the answers. And I hope he’ll always see in me the girl with pixie bangs who wouldn’t shut up.

The other day I said to a friend, “Now, we’ve been married longer than we’ve been alive.” What I meant was that we got married over half our lives ago, right out of college. It was the year before everyone started living together. It’s hard to remember that there was a time, before 1967, when it would have broken our mothers’ hearts to have children “living in sin.”

Perhaps if we’d waited, we would have just lived together. And perhaps if we had just lived together, we could easily have moved out when we started fighting and everyone said marriage wasn’t cool.

My sister asked me last week if we had a good relationship. I think we must unless we’re masochists. “You were so desperately in love,” she said.

Desperate? That sounded kind of funny now. Twenty-year-olds are desperately in love. Forty-year-olds are desperately trying to get everything done.

For our anniversary, our friends Roberta and Rocky made us dinner. They were at our wedding. They’ve been married 24 years. Roberta was my role model as a bride. When she went to Cost Plus Imports to get stuff for her newlywed apartment, I followed suit. When she cooked Hamburger Stroganoff Surprise, I asked for the recipe.

But when she bought the hanging rattan chairs and hanging ashtrays, I gave up. It was Roberta’s plan to have everything in her house suspended from the ceiling.

The anniversary dinner consisted of all food from the ‘60s. First we drank bossa novas (pineapple juice and rum) and had potato chips and onion dip. Then we had pineapple chicken and pineapple Minute Rice and lime Jell-O mixed with Cool Whip and ginger ale. After dinner, we played bridge the way we did then--I was partners with Roberta’s husband and she with mine. This was as close to open marriage as we ever got.

We don’t think of the ‘60s as a time when people got married, played bridge, swung only from the furniture and served their friends a prized Jell-O mold. Maybe if the war in Vietnam hadn’t heated up, we would have stayed that way.

The year we got married, the Beach Boys had a hit song called “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” If you heard it in the ‘70s, you might have assumed it was ironic. It was all about how swell it would be to live together and be married.

The song was in my head as I said “I do.” In the years after, as people died in war, got beaten in riots, overdosed on drugs and split up, it was hard to do the nice thing. It was not something you could rationally plan.

But when I saw that tall, dark guy in the bookstore, I realized I’d follow him to the end of the irrational Earth.