The Marriage Decision

In March of 2006, I didn’t have a cell phone. I might have been the only person on the entire trading floor at Lehman who didn’t have a cell phone. I rather liked the fact that nobody could reach out and get a hold of me—incognito mode. But there was a senior sales trader on the desk who was so disgusted with the fact that it was 2006 and I still didn’t have a cell phone that he grabbed me by the shirt and marched me across the street to the Verizon store to get a phone. I got a flip phone with the T9Word text messaging algorithm.

So I’m standing there in the store, and the salesman asks me, what number do you want? I’m like, what, I get to choose my number? He said that I could choose my area code. I could get a 201 number because I lived in New Jersey, or I could get a 212 number because I worked in the city.

“I’ll get the 201 number, I said.”

I am still paying for that one almost 20 years later. I could have had a 212 area code! Now, whenever I call someone, it comes up as “Newark,” and nobody is answering any phone calls that come from Newark. If they do pick up, I have to have a big long conversation about why I have a 201 area code when I live in South Carolina. It’s a conversation starter for sure, but not in a good way. I curse myself every time someone asks about it. I am the world’s biggest dingus.

That, obviously, is a small decision. A bigger decision is:

· Who to marry

I got that one right, am I am coming up on my 28^th anniversary this summer. I found this smoking hot brunette when I was 15, dated her for a few years, broke up with her in a fit of pique, and a couple of years later, realized my error and reached back out to her and patched things up. I proposed when I was 21. I got married when I was 23. That decision—above all decisions—was the best decision I made in my life. Any other good decision I made from that point on was a result of that one good decision.

How do you get the marriage decision right? Admittedly, I am not an expert on this. It’s not like I sat around ratiocinating it, making a list of the pros and the cons. I was in love, and she was in love with me, and we had huge amounts of fun together, so it seemed like the obvious thing to do. 28 years later, we are still having laughs. And we really are growing old together—I’m getting paunchy in my old age, with a host of ailments, and she is going through menopause, and I find her hot flashes to be very funny. We said that we’d grow old together, and we are. Our marriage (with a few hiccups around the time I got the cell phone) has pretty much been right out of The Notebook. I’d like to think that our end will be the same as in The Notebook, passing away peacefully together in bed, but there is little chance of that—my health is poor and I have bad genetics and my goal is basically to make as much money as humanly possible before I take a dirtnap, so that I can take care of her long after I’m gone.

Every marriage has its rough spots, including some very rough spots, but hoo boy, I have seen some bad ones. People calling the cops on each other, screaming, throwing shit, addiction, infidelity—and those aren’t even the really bad ones. So this is the part that I don’t fully understand—do some people just pick the wrong people? Or do people have bad relationship skills? Or crappy values? Everything else can be going well in your life, but if your marriage sucks, you’re miserable. Conversely, I have seen some marriages saved. I have seen people put in the effort and work it out. You have probably also heard the story, apocryphal or not, that arranged marriages have a higher success rate than traditional marriages. Pick two random people, stick them together under one roof, and they manage to make it work. Why is that?

The answer comes from famed 80s psychotherapist M. Scott Peck, who wrote about love in The Road Less Traveled. Love, he said, is not a feeling. Love is an action. Falling in love, or romantic love, is more of a physiological phenomenon, but it is no indication that the relationship is going to work. That wears off after a while and then you have two flawed human beings stuck with each other in a house. People get cause and effect reversed. Couples complain that they no longer love each other. What they are saying is that they don’t have that feeling of love. But that feeling of love is the byproduct of action—if you do loving things for another person, then you will get the feeling. Love is taking out the trash. Love is not leaving dishes in the sink. Love is also making sacrifices so you can make a fuckload of money to provide for the family. Love is not making the sarcastic comment. Love is showing up to the big events. Love is (as my wife did for me over the weekend) emptying the bucket of puke when your spouse has a stomach virus. It is all of these things. If you find that you have “fallen out of love,” maybe try taking some action? Maybe try doing some of these things? Maybe then you will feel love once again, when you act selflessly.

Trump is president now, so I guess it is acceptable to say that there are differences between the sexes. Women want certain things out of a relationship and men want certain things out of a relationship. Men are good at big, sweeping gestures—look at this $2,000 necklace I bought you! My wife has a jewelry box full of $2,000 necklaces that she never wears. For a birthday present, I think she would just want me to put the dishes in the dishwasher for a week. It’s the small things that women like. Men like to be admired. Once in my life, and not with my wife, a woman told me that I was strong—and I have never forgotten it. Men like to be told they are strong, brave, handsome, and smart—and women frequently aren’t too good in the admiration department. In fact, most of them are pretty terrible. My wife doesn’t call me strong, brave, handsome, or smart, but she does tell me that I’m really good at my job, and I’ll take it. We both value competence.

We’ve done a lot together, from skinny-dipping in a lake in Nova Scotia, to driving cross-country with all of our belongings and a cat, to getting $29 hotel rooms at the Tropicana in Atlantic City, to sleeping in a tent pretty much everywhere, to exploring the island of Milos in Greece, to laying out by the pool at the Gansevoort in Turks and Caicos, listening to deep house on the sound system—our first real vacation. But we don’t have to travel to have a good time. Our typical night: we sit on the couch with cats. I’m watching baseball and writing, and she’s reading a book on her iPad. Every once in a while, we’ll look up and make some snarky comment about some stupid commercial, then go back to baseball and reading. I am a big proponent of doing shit, going out and making memories, on the idea that you won’t remember all the time you spent sitting on the couch, but I treasure that time sitting on the couch. Then we say “bedtime” and the cats run upstairs and go to bed. We brush our teeth and take some vitamins and fall into bed and cuddle for 15 minutes—every single night. I could do this for the rest of my life.

Recently my wife had to go in for some medical procedures. She was a little nervous about it. I was also a little nervous about it, but I wasn’t about to let on. I’m with her behind the curtain—she’s in the hospital bed hooked up to an IV. They take her away. She’s gone for about an hour. I had brought my laptop, and I’m in the waiting room writing something. Finally, they call me back. She’s in bed, still asleep from the anesthesia. Slowly she starts to wake up. She opens her eyes, turns and looks at me, and says, “I love you.” She says it over and over again. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

I will remember this forever, for as long as I live.