Riding It Out Like Stock Market, Marriage Has Fluctuations

My daughter posed the question in all seriousness:

“I heard a story that every person was split in half by lightning. We spend our lives searching for the other half,” my 10-year-old said. “Are you and Daddy soul mates?”

How could I answer her? Is she too young to be told that sometimes we aren’t even friends?

An acquaintance who knows my husband and me was equally misguided.

“You must be so much fun together,” she said, “because you’re both so funny.”

Ha, ha. That’s right. We’re just a barrel of laughs - except of course when we aren’t laughing. Longtime married couples, I’ve noticed, don’t tend to do that as much.

The other night, over dinner, my husband was telling another couple his story about a lawsuit that resulted after a dessert exploded in a woman’s face. He has been telling the story for 20 years, and he still can’t remember if the dessert was bananas flambe or bananas Foster.

He always gets it wrong, and I no longer bother to correct him. Everyone thinks it’s a great story - everyone but me. After 20 years, the story is more threadbare than the upholstery in my car - and the car has 100,000 miles on it.

I think in a marriage with a lot of miles on it, your spouse can become like that story: appreciated more by a new audience than the old one.

My husband is a lot of my past, and I expect him to be a lot of my future. Most of the time, after 21 years together, we are lovers and friends. Yet once in a while, in the present tense, we aren’t.

When marriages fail, it’s often not because of cataclysmic explosion. The structure that is a relationship does not crumble. It erodes. Life’s little aggravations chip away at the channels of communication and affection. Partners stop feeling for each other.

“Sometimes I just feel so much pressure,” I told my husband at the start of an extremely packed day.

“You don’t know what pressure is,” he answered. This was not a smart response. The atmosphere chilled instantly by several degrees.

When we aren’t getting along, my husband and I don’t yell or throw the dishes. We continue to confer, but we mostly stop communicating.

“How angry at me are you?” my husband asked the other day, rather in the nature of performing a scientific inquiry. He was probing to take my emotional temperature, the way a cook checks the status of the turkey. He wanted to know if I was still red-hot inside.

I responded silently by giving him The Look, a genetically patented glance of contempt. It is an inherited response, not learned. My mother was great at this Look, and I am not bad. My daughter is terrific.

This time, The Look was asking: When are you going to stop being a tourist around here and start pitching in like a resident?

My husband views our ups and downs as part of the periodic cycle of marriage. While I worry more about our daily status, he tends to think market fluctuations won’t affect the long-term value of our stock.

He acknowledges that, as President John Kennedy once said, whatever he does he could surely do more. If husbands did more, of course, wives would criticize less.

My sister’s Dalmatian died recently, asleep in the doghouse one night. I told my husband.

“I’m going to die like that,” he said.

“Quietly in your sleep?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “In the doghouse.”

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Teryl Zarnow The Orange County Register