Together and Apart

It’s Sunday and my wife returns from an extended trip this morning. She’s been gone about three weeks – doing things with people. I have been home in Savannah tending dogs and home, and trying to keep my adult son fed on better foods than he would select for himself if he were living on his own. (One of the annoying things about being a parent, I have learned, is that you don’t stop parenting just because your children are no longer children.)

Her trip is a reversal from the way things usually operate around here. Most times, I’m the one flying off to exotic locales like Ames, Iowa or Grand Rapids, Michigan. There have been times, though not many, when I’ve been gone for as long as six weeks at a time. This when we had young children and leaving her was an actual hardship - for her, not me. I couldn’t get out of that hellhouse fast enough.

We will have been married twenty-six years this autumn, and when I think about how we’ve survived as a couple this long, I have to give at least partial credit to frequent absences. I’m a big fan of time apart. The big, empty bed. The make-your-own-schedule. The lack of guilt when ordering a 20-piece McNuggets at midnight. But it’s not simply a matter of indulging one’s self. It’s also about not having to see the other person’s face.

Don’t misunderstand. I love my wife’s face. It is probably a Top 3 face. But even wonderful people with wonderful faces are best enjoyed in large – but not uninterrupted – doses. It’s why, during our six months abroad last year, when we had nobody but each other to keep us company, we often spent our days apart, with her traipsing around Rome or London to visit important cultural sites while I stayed in our little apartment watching YouTube videos about RVs. We also did many things together, of course, but our adventures apart were just as important as the stuff we did as a couple.

Pictured: the author and his wife.

Marriage is an infernal convention. Or, at least, we moderns have made it so. Consider the absurdity of signing a contract that obligates you to hang out with another person for life. Often, the people signing those contracts aren’t even old to rent an automobile, but they’re committing the entirety of their earthly existence to another. What?

That person is assigned the role of lover, friend, business partner, housemate, caretaker, and co-parent. Do you know how many people in my life I would trust with all of those responsibilities? Exactly zero. Nor would I want anybody else to expect me to perform well in all of those roles. I can tell you right now: I would not hire me to fulfill any two of those obligations, let alone the whole kit-and-caboodle. Not even just the caboodle. Worse, you could set aside the whole list of obligations and just focus on the single question: who in your life would you want to hang out with for a single week? Again, that number is close to zero. Yet most people, at some point in their lives, will voluntarily enter this dubious arrangement.

We do so because our most fundamental need – well, maybe second or third most fundamental need after eating and good internet service – is love. Love is a many-splendored word. It can many things and come from many sources, but marital love is distinct because it incorporates a certain level of – for lack of a better word – unlove.

By “unlove,” I mean that marital love requires us to accept the whole of a person, even the stuff that we would prefer to do without. In my case, for example, I am a hopeless pedant, a lackluster cleaner, and an elite-level farter. Martha could, undoubtedly, provide a much longer list of my deficiencies. There is much about me to unlove, yet she persists in offering me her love and I her mine. That is the commitment we made to each other, a commitment we made with only a half-formed notion of what we were doing.

No marriage is alike, but all marriages are similar. Each develops its own biorhythms. The years teach you to trust those rhythms, to believe that a trough will eventually lead to a peak. If the peaks outnumber the troughs, I would say that’s a successful marriage.

One of the best ways I’ve found for us to remain in love is for us to spend time apart. Our separations are common and necessary. Not because our love is any weaker when we are together, but because our togetherness is better when we have time apart. In a sense, though, a long marriage erases distance. I feel connected to her all the time, no matter where I am, just as two subatomic particles can remain entangled regardless of their distance from each other.

There is some irony in the fact that one of the most effective tools we’ve developed for staying together is staying apart, at least some of the time. I will miss the empty bed but I like it better with her beside me in it. My schedule will have to be altered to accommodate hers, and the McDonalds will remain unordered for the foreseeable future, unless she wants some, in which case we’re going nuts on McNuggets. (Yes, I’m a vegetarian, but McNuggets is a funny word and, in truth, I did order them with some frequency when I was on the road.)

Alright, I’m going to get in the car and go pick up my honey, a woman whose name escapes me at the moment. A marriage is something like a lifelong secret, unknowable to all but those within it. The longer you keep it, the more precious it becomes.