Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [59]
When I first learned about Kyrgyz courtship, I was horrified and shocked. Then I began to remember something that was told me by my aunt, a sophisticated upper-middle-class housewife from a country known as Long Island. My aunt was a seventysomething, retired, fashionably dressed former docent who never missed a museum opening. One day, while I was suffering from the kind of whiplash that only the sudden collapse of a long-term relationship can inflict, we met for lunch in a trendy Manhattan café. In awe of the contrast between her life history and my own, I asked her to explain the secret of what she constantly referred to as her “happy forty-year marriage.” I was expecting to hear a predictable string of platitudes along the lines of “Never go to bed angry” or “Don’t take each other for granted.”
Instead I got this: “Well, dear, not a day goes by that he doesn’t make me cry.”
After a rather long silence, I asked, “If he makes you cry every day, why do you call it a happy marriage?”
“Honey,” she said, “you learn to take the good with the bad.”
That shoulder-shrugging grain-of-salt approach to companionship pretty much summed up the old-school prerequisites for a functional romantic union between two humans. The male half of a lucky couple only needed to earn a living. The female was supposed to have babies, do the housework and the shopping, and get her hair done now and then. And having accomplished that, they were both expected to call whatever else happened as the years went rolling by “a happy marriage.”
Not anymore.
Today’s peppy modern spouses don’t have the patience for a “happy” marriage to someone who makes them cry every day (unless one of them has their own reality show with a thirteen-week guarantee). These days, unhappily married men and women carry within their souls an alternative vision of themselves as a spouse-seeking Ulysses, riding the bounding main on a forty- or fifty-year voyage in search of the perfect soul mate. For those who embark on such a quest, the journey starts out smooth, with the wind in their sails, as they brave the mighty oceans in record time. But by their forties, even the most energetic and gregarious among them are so seasick from the vagaries of dating that they can’t face the awful truth: that those first three chemically charged sunlit months of any new relationship are a honeymoon period and a totally false read. During this rosy-hued but unreliable time, plenty of clearly observable bad behavioral patterns go overlooked. It’s only in the aftermath of the inevitable wreck that the survivor discovers that buried within the splinters of yet another crashed relationship lies a black box full of recordings picked up by an early tracking system they were choosing to ignore.
Until our culture heeds my pleas for the establishment of a national network of diagnostic stations where one can drop off new love interests and have them evaluated, as one does when purchasing a used car, we will continue to be forced to rely on our instincts. And since no one seems to have the faintest idea what those are, here is a list of specific behavioral clues I have been collecting for the express purpose of helping confused and clueless friends of mine avoid repeating the mistakes I am pretending that I will never make again.
1. AN OBVIOUS LACK OF INTEREST IN YOU
There are so many socially acceptable ways for someone to exhibit a pathological lack of empathy nowadays that this is a