Marriage

I wrote this piece on marriage before Mark was diagnosed with cancer. While it questions the institution, it pays homage to Mark’s tenacity and love, which is what it's all about.


I recently reread Shulamith Firestone’s book, The Dialectic of Sex, and while I reject the cyber solutions she posits, her description of marriage is right on the money:
“A second cultural prop to the outmoded institution is the privatization of the marriage experience: each partner enters marriage convinced that what happened to his parents, what happened to his friends can never happen to him. Though Wrecked Marriage has become a national hobby, a universal obsession—as witnessed by the booming business of guidebooks to marriage and divorce, the women’s magazine industry, an affluent class of marriage counselors and shrinks . . . still one encounters everywhere a defiant ‘We’re different’ brand of optimism in which the one good marriage in the community is habitually cited to prove that it is possible.”

I’m guilty as charged. While I’m not married, per se, I’ve lived with a partner for 33 years and have two children with that partner—Mark. I didn’t exactly rationalize our relationship with the thought that we could do it “better,” at least at the beginning. It was fraught with difficulty from day one, as I had no idea how to live with a man and he’d already spent nine years living with his first wife. Ours was more of a partnership by default (a common theme in my life). We were both living in Placitas at the time, a little village at the north end of the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque, when our mutual friends Anne and Charlie decided to move to Arkansas where Charlie could go to Physician’s Assistant school. Mark and I both claimed that they’d told each of us we could move into their cheap little house. He was living in a leaky dome up in Dome Valley and my landlady was moving back into her house and kicking me out. We were having an affair, but it was new and I certainly was not ready for a commitment beyond that. I suggested we move into Anne and Charlie’s house as roommates. Mark would have none of that, so we moved in as lovers and I did a lot of crying those first couple of months, as I learned what it meant to live intimately with a man.

We started out keeping our finances separate. There was never any doubt that I wouldn’t marry him. But we became a couple, partying with all the other couples and families in Placitas, some of whom had previously been members of communes but had eventually drifted into more traditional relationships. The months somehow turned into years. We were both so poor we eventually pooled our resources. And we started building a house together on the land I had bought outside the village before we were together. (I’d borrowed the down payment from my mother and made monthly payments; in those days, land was cheap.) Five years later, we had our first child. Seven years later we had our second one.

Before we had the first one there was talk of extending our family to include a female friend of ours who I had known since college. She was single, she and Mark got along well, she loved New Mexico, and we didn’t want to be a nuclear family. We talked about having two mothers, but I don’t think we talked about our being two wives—at least with her. I always thought it would be a good idea. But we had lots of good ideas in those days and few of them came to fruition. So I ended up in a nuclear family situation, rationalizing like all the rest, that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes our parents made, that our generation was more enlightened and better able to avoid the pitfalls of marriage, particularly with regard to a woman’s position in society. I don’t know why we made those assumptions, as on a daily basis we had to deal with all the cultural issues that had never been resolved, particularly the woman’s issue. I fought like hell to maintain a position of equality and independence, both circumstantially and psychologically. It made for a very combative relationship that ultimately elicited resentment and regret.

But for some reason we stayed together. Inertia? Money (we never made any)? The kids (our older son once told us he’d kill us if we ever broke up)? Fear of being alone (it is a travesty in this world that our two choices are living in nuclear families or living alone)? I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and even discussed it once with a therapist who I went to see when the built-up resentment over the battles I’d had to fight to maintain equality was making me hateful. And I finally figured out what it comes down to is loyalty. I know that Mark, as a white male who grew up in a culture of dominance against which we all have to struggle, has made that his struggle as well, and I know that he has tried, to his best ability, to shed those shackles. I also know that despite his foibles and insecurities he has been incredibly loyal to me and continues to try to make me happy.

So here I am, more than 30 years later, rereading Shulamith Firestone (I’ve searched for information about what ever happened to her after the publication of The Dialectic of Sex and have come up with nothing). My older son has been in a series of monogamous relationships since he was in high school, and is now marrying a lovely and independent woman. My younger son is still in college and to my knowledge has never had a serious relationship with anyone. Both of them at least had a less traditional upbringing than Mark and I did, were less pressured in high school to pair off and become part of a couple, and have been exposed to an array of peers and friends who function quite well outside mainstream society. But they also have the weight of the marketplace on their backs and have less opportunity to slip through the cracks that Mark and I managed to navigate because the cracks aren’t there anymore. I don’t know if either will ever have children, and although Mark and I would be doting grandparents, that may not be such a bad thing. But I fervently hope that they both find some way to live with other men and women who will care about them, be intimate with them, and create a family for them, not necessarily based on marriage between a man and a woman with two kids.

Solution: To recognize and encourage—socially, legally, economically—everyone’s personal choices about how they want to live with other people.