Happily Married . . . or Just Nuts?

Do you have a perfect marriage?

Do your eyes still lock across a crowded room as everyone else fades into the background?

Do you feel unfulfilled every moment that passes outside the company of your spouse?

If so, pardon me while I stick my finger down my throat.

I have no patience for couples who feel the need to maintain an air of perfection about their unions.

Give me reality . . . or give me a drink, because that’s the only way I can tolerate lovebirds who claim to sing in perfect harmony.

This is not a plea for naked honesty. Certain things about a husband and wife should remain hidden from the outside world, wrapped up in layers of privacy and gently stored in the delicate box of common cause that is a marriage.

Believe me, I’m not about to tell you any of those.

But.

There are other, less intimate disclosures to be made in the interest of friendship. As we slog along a path that is as apt to be strewn with briars as with posies, sharing our woes is a survival technique, a way of navigating the tough spots.

Maybe it’s nothing more than a signpost marking the end of youth and the onset of middle age, but I’ve reached a point where it is possible to be truthful about my marriage without feeling I’ve betrayed a sacred trust.

This--and the fact that toothpaste tubes now come with flip tops--can only fortify the nuptial bond.

*

We sat around the kitchen counter, three working mothers, while our small children played and fought in the next room. As is customary, the subject of marital discord came up.

In the last few years, the burdens of work and home have grown, sometimes unmanageably. We are only human. We relieve stress by picking fights with the ones we love. We relieve the stress of fighting by checking in with each other.

Wife 1, cautiously: Do you ever feel like your husband just doesn’t like you?

Wife 2: All the time!

Wife 3: It’s one of my standard fighting refrains: “If you dislike me so much, why did you marry me?”

Wife 1: When I ask my other friends about this, they all look at me like I’m crazy, like they don’t know what I’m talking about.

Wife 1 and Wife 2, in unison: Liars, liars, pants on fi-re!

Hanging around toddlers has its rhetorical benefits.

*

The current issue of Psychology Today has a package on the “Art of Happiness.” In a discussion of the importance of play--and how it is becoming a lost art--researchers report that playfulness is an important component of successful marriage.

“The loss of playfulness in a marriage,” they noted, “was strongly correlated with the onset of marital dysfunction.”

Boy, ain’t it?

I have often thought that the minute my husband--who is one of the funniest (and moodiest) guys I know--stops making me laugh, we’re dead meat.

Although I would be mortified if anyone ever overheard us in one of our goofier moments, I can offer this as an example of his demented sensibilities: He works as a juvenile probation officer in a camp that is home to budding, self-serious gangsters from all over L.A. County. My husband is known to show up in madras shorts and a propeller-topped beanie and never crack a smile.

Once, in Mexico, I had to draw the line when he got out of the car and tried to sing for pesos at the border. I thought it very funny until I realized he was terrorizing a Volvo full of nuns.

*

Lots of people study divorce, but few have spent much time studying what makes marriage work.

Psychologist Judith Wallerstein, who has been widely acclaimed for her work on divorce, particularly as it affects children, has a new book out with Sandra Blakeslee, “The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts” (Houghton Mifflin).

The book has generated tremendous publicity for Wallerstein, who proceeded from a simple premise that studying marriages described by both spouses as “happy” might be instructive in a world where the institution has taken a beating. (One in two American marriages ends in divorce.)

How comforting to learn that happy is a relative term, and when it is used to describe a marriage, applicable mainly to the long haul.

Some of Wallerstein’s happy couples described going weeks without speaking to each other, or screaming, yelling and throwing things in anger. Some had episodes of going to bed angry and waking up angrier. A few had meaningless sexual romps on the road.

If you can get through the rough patches and still laugh at each other’s jokes, you’re either happily married or nuts.

Nothing wrong with being both.

* Robin Abcarian’s column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.