Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  “It’s four-thirty in the morning now. Do you think you can wait until like eight, to a more decent time?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Okay, baby. I’ll call him right now. It’s going to be okay.”

  Dr. Young answered the phone as if he was awake, just waiting for the call. When you have an appointment with him in his office, he’s the kind of doctor who doesn’t just see you for five or ten minutes; he’ll talk to you about your year and how it’s been going. You think you’re just having a conversation, but he’s steadily gathering data. At the end of the conversation he’ll tell you, “Okay, I want you to go do this test and this test” because of something you said, something you mentioned in passing and haven’t thought about anymore. When Courtney saw him, Dr. Young probably realized that he had been trying to do everything. He knew Courtney wasn’t dying. He talked to Courtney in a very calm and soothing voice.

  “Don’t you make any decisions. You have a wife there and you allow her to make the decisions and care for you.”

  And in that weak moment I had the opportunity to be strong for him the way he’s always strong for me.

  Chapter 20

  How Two Become One

  When we returned home it was the first time we’d lived together for more than a few days at a time. Before our wedding we had decided that I’d move into Angela’s house. I had been renting, she owned her home and it was big enough for us. A few people had warned me “a man shouldn’t move into a house a woman already owned.” But we thought it made sense, and it has been one of the best decisions we have made as husband and wife.

  I remember when I first brought my clothes over, she had cleared space for me to put them in her closet. I appreciated her thoughtfulness but turned down her offer. I already knew how that was going to play out over time. I needed some room to hang up my tux, my suits, shirts and shoes, but most of my wardrobe consists of T-shirts, sweats and blue jeans. Even when we go to formal functions, I wash, comb my hair, brush my teeth, put on some lotion, dust off my tux and am ready to go. For Angela, it’s an all-day process. She has a stylist help pick out clothes and jewelry, a person to do her hair, she gets her fingernails and toes done, has someone “beat” her face, then she pulls it all together. With all that drama and its related accessories, I knew that eventually she would slowly but surely reclaim the part of her closet she had allowed me to occupy and I would eventually be left with a drawer! No thank you! It was a nice gesture that I was supposed to turn down. See, husbands have to know these things! She also “gave” me three or four drawers and my own cabinet in the bathroom. That worked. Of course, now I’m down to one drawer and half a cabinet in the bathroom, but at least I’m still in the room!

  After I moved my clothes in, I wondered, “Now what?” We started figuring out some household logistics.

  “You leave the dishes dirty like that? Okay.”

  “You don’t like to cook or clean? Oh…”

  “You do like to put flowers around the house? Okay.”

  “Well, I like to grocery shop. I take care of that.”

  “Are we going to create a budget? No? Well how are we going to manage our finances?”

  During the first six months after our wedding, neither of us was home very much. Even though we were married and acting often requires being away, our love of our craft is so great neither of us wanted to give anything up. I had my list of projects I was planning to work on and she had hers. On top of that, we had separate management teams. She had her agent; I had mine. She had her manager; I had mine. She had her business manager; I had mine. She had her publicist; I had mine. For years we had followed our teams’ recommendations and trusted them. But it quickly became clear to us that having so many people on two different teams directing our moves was causing chaos in our household. We needed a vision about how we would run our family. We were married, but the way we lived and approached important decisions about the amount of time we spent apart, our finances and priorities, we still acted single.

  I felt that it was my responsibility as man of the house not to be the breadwinner, but to create an atmosphere of safety, stability and love within our family. I wanted to bring order to our household and thought I should lead the process. I knew that if Angela and I were going to thrive professionally for the long term, and successfully provide for and raise the children we envisioned, rather than all these people pulling us in different directions, we’d need to surround ourselves with people who had a vested interest in our family and our values. When I had been on the set of Space Cowboys, I got to see how Clint Eastwood worked. Clint arrived on set at six in the morning and left at six in the evening. Each day we rehearsed the heck out of our scenes but only shot them twice. Then he hopped on his helicopter and headed back to his home in Carmel so he could be with his family. That was the model I wanted to follow. I wanted to put family first.

  During our premarital counseling our pastor had suggested that Angela and I spend two years getting to know each other and solidifying our marriage before having children. We thought that was a good idea; but we hadn’t considered the implications of marrying later in life and her biological clock. I brought up the subject of children early on in an attempt to talk about creating a plan for them.

  “How are we ever going to have children if both of us are always working and traveling?” I asked. “How are we going to raise them if neither of us is ever home?”

  “Courtney, that’s too much for me to think about right now,” she answered. “We said we weren’t going to have children for two years. I’m an actress, I love what I do. I don’t want to think about children yet.”

  “But, Angela, we have to start planning now…”

  “Courtney, that’s too overwhelming. I’m doing this right now. I can’t think about that.”

  “But, Angela,” I pushed.

  The next thing I knew, Angela was yelling at me and was closing herself up in the bathroom.

  Oh, my goodness! What just happened? I wondered. “Angela. Angela…” I sat on the floor outside the door. What had I done that was so horrible? For a few moments I pushed for an answer, but the Lord told me to sit still, be quiet and not to raise my voice. An hour later she came out.

  “Baby, what did I do to get you so upset?” I quietly asked her.

  “Oh, Courtney, it’s not you, it’s me. I shouldn’t have—”

  “But, honey, did I do something?”

  “You didn’t do anything, Courtney. It was me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Courtney,” she began slowly, “I want to have babies and start our family, but there’s so much on us right now. We said that for two years all we were going to do was get to know each other. I want us to do that. Thinking about babies right now is overwhelming to me. I want to have a family but I also love what I do. If I stop working, am I going to lose my career? Will I have to leave my craft? How will I make money? It’s too much right now.”

  I understood what Angela meant; I was concerned about some of the same things. Acting careers are very tenuous. No matter how good you are or how much money you make, there’s no job security. Your livelihood can disappear overnight if you make the wrong career move, someone decides you’re not “hot” anymore or you fall out of the public eye. Our careers were going well, but Angela and I weren’t kids anymore. There are not a lot of roles for middle-aged people, especially women. There are fewer roles for black, middle-aged actors and actresses. I wanted us to figure out how to navigate through all these issues together, but I didn’t know how to get us on the same page.

  “You’ve got to go to school—you have to study your wife,” Dr. Little would coach me. “You have to learn what she likes, dislikes and how she likes things to be and go. That means you’ve gotta be home sometimes and you’ve gotta pay attention. Then you have to apply what you learn. It takes time, Courtney.

  “You have to get a Ph.D. in Angela. Once you study her and learn how to meet her needs, she’s
a good woman, order will come to your household.”

  There was a part of me that understood that Dr. Little was right. I respected him and it was clear from his own life that he knew what he was talking about. He had a wonderful wife and five children and he’d recounted stories of how they’d survived challenging times. But we needed to make changes quickly, I thought. And there were times when I resented having to do additional work on myself. I had done so much work with Dr. K., I mistakenly believed I was done improving. I thought—poof!—our relationship was just supposed to happen. Although I had gotten saved, had been going to church and we had entered a spiritual union, I didn’t realize I wasn’t yet spiritually mature—or that spiritual maturity was important. And I didn’t understand what marriage was about or how much work and sacrifice it is. There were times when I didn’t feel like learning more about my wife. Did “putting Angela first,” as Doc suggested, mean putting her needs before mine? Wasn’t a marriage supposed to be 50/50?

  Every marriage goes through rough patches. Ours happened early on, as we dealt with these kinds of issues. We struggled for several years, during a time when many marriages are still in the honeymoon stage. For my part I didn’t know how to keep going emotionally during times when our union felt like 75/25 or 100/0. I didn’t know how to get us working like a team. I didn’t know how to keep going while I was waiting for my wife to understand that I had her best interests in mind, and trust me. I didn’t yet understand that being the “leader” of my home wasn’t the same as telling her what to do. Instead, I pushed her, manipulated her and tried to win and be right. When that didn’t work, I’d sulk and pout. Rightly so, Angela resisted me a lot. Sometimes it was because she needed to grow in certain areas, but it was often because of how I approached her.

  “I’m the only one trying to figure this out,” I’d say to Doc then complain about something Angela had or hadn’t done.

  “Courtney, it’s your job to ‘cover’ your family—to be the ‘priest of your home.’ That comes from practicing loving-kindness and making sacrifices. Sometimes it’s not 50/50. Sometimes it’s 100/0,” he’d tell me. “Christ gave us the example of unconditional love, and you’ve made a commitment—a covenant—before God. Your role is not to ‘fix’ Angela. You need to put your nose in that Bible and work on understanding what a ‘good man’ really means. In the meantime, be patient with her, show her the example of the servant leader, and let God do the changing.”

  “Well, how long is that going to take?”

  “It’s none of your concern. You talk the talk, Courtney, but can you walk the walk?”

  Walking the walk required a tremendous amount of effort. Sometimes I succeeded; other times I failed miserably or would resort to old tricks to feel more in control. Whenever I would complain, Doc would call me on my behavior.

  “Men have been lying and trying to manipulate Angela for her entire life. You have to show her you’re different. Just love her, Courtney. Lead by example and be patient enough to let God turn her. God will order your household by ordering you first. As he works on you, she’ll see God in you and a different dialogue will begin. But he can’t move on her until he orders you—you’re the key. If you don’t allow him to work on you and through you, nothing in your family will work.”

  “But, Doc…”

  “No more buts, Courtney; just do it. This is on God’s timetable, not yours.”

  “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime God will take care of you,” Dr. Little reminded me. “God has your back, Courtney.”

  As I struggled to master various spiritual lessons, our relationship, which I had thought was so strong, floundered.

  “Maybe we got married too soon,” she said a couple of times within the first year we were married.

  Oh, no! In my mind divorce could not be an option. I took off my wedding band and held it between my fingers in front of Angela’s face.

  “Do you see this ring?”

  “Yeah…”

  “This circle represents the continuity of our marriage. We are going to stay within it. There is no divorce—we are not getting divorced! We are going to figure this out—and we’re going to figure it out together! Everything we need to do is going to happen within this circle.”

  “Okay…”

  I knew that I didn’t want to get divorced, but I didn’t know how to be married. I often rebelled against the lessons Dr. Little was teaching and the ideals I was learning in the Bible. I longed for the freestyle kind of lifestyle I had experienced before I was married. I resisted so much that God began to box me into a corner to get my attention. During the first couple of years of our marriage, my career opportunities slowed down. For the first time in my adult life there were times when I wasn’t working. That weighed heavily on me. I had been making less money than Angela, but that didn’t bother me; I was working and making a solid financial contribution to our home. Now I wasn’t working for months at a time. That had never happened to me. I felt very insecure—as an actor and a man.

  Angela was facing similar challenges, but things were going much better for her. For the most part, she stayed busy. It had never occurred to me that my career would suddenly slow down. And in a profession where you know how you’re doing partly by the way people respond to you, I had never considered what it would be like not to get the same amount of recognition I was accustomed to receiving. With my career stalling, my ego got fragile. From time to time when cameras would be popping around Angela, I would feel a little slighted. I wondered, What about me? We’re a couple. It should be about both of us.

  So many things were going wrong—from business teams undermining the order and organization I was trying to establish, to the shock of having all these disagreements with the woman I loved, to my disappointment that I hadn’t yet earned my wife’s respect, to now not having enough work. I reached a point where I felt like a broken man. One day I just fell to my knees.

  “Lord, I can’t do this anymore,” I prayed. “We need order in our household—is that asking too much? What do I have to do?”

  As I kneeled by the side of my bed, I finally began to surrender my will to God’s will. I knew I had been resisting the messenger of the Word he had sent to me. Doc had been trying to get me to read the Bible more, to practice what I preached and to be the “priest” of our home.

  “Jesus came to serve not to be served. As the leader, you’re setting the tone of love in the household. Follow Jesus’ example and be a servant leader. If you start serving and supporting Angela, she’ll see that you are the man you say you are and give you the respect you’re looking for. Don’t tell Angela what to do, show her. Do your work for two years and I promise you, God will reorder your home. He will bring you the desires of your heart.”

  I knew Doc was right. I needed to stop pushing back and to just do what God had been telling me through him.

  “Not my will, God, but thy will be done,” I prayed.

  Once I surrendered, God began working with me. Now that he had my attention, he could take over. Everything started to change.

  I decided to take up Doc’s challenge to begin to look at life’s circumstances as opportunities to practice the lessons I was learning as I studied the Bible. I realized that he was challenging me to apply Dr. K.’s advice to be patient—to let the “mud settle in the water”—but from a biblical perspective. I was beginning to understand why I needed to be patient; not just with Angela, but with everyone—rather than trying to force everything to happen myself, I needed to sit back and allow God to do his work! As I considered my life in this light, I realized that the times when I wasn’t working presented a perfect opportunity. I stopped worrying as much about my employment situation and what Angela was or was not doing and went into study mode. I just focused on the Bible. When I woke up in the morning, I’d pray and read scripture before I did anything else. The more I learned, the more I realized that Doc’s advice that marriage was a wonderful opport
unity to practice walking like Christ was right.

  While I “put my nose in the Bible,” I also began to “study” Angela. I remembered Dr. K.’s observation that Bottom and I were so intertwined I knew how he was feeling even though we were unable to speak. How come I’d known when my dog wanted attention or needed to be left alone, but I didn’t know that about my wife? Something was definitely wrong with that picture! I needed to take that lesson into my marriage.

  As I paid more attention to Angela, I realized Doc was right—she is very complex. Men and women are different anyway, but women are extremely complicated. I had to learn to pay attention. Once I did, I realized she was easier to understand. Timing is everything with Angela. Her emotions and ability to focus are great gifts and they help her be a phenomenal actor. When she gets excited she focuses on something and really throws herself into it. But when she’s focused like that, it’s not necessarily a good time to talk to her about other things. Lots of times she doesn’t feel like being bothered. That has nothing to do with me; it’s just part of her nature. So why get sensitive about it? Now that I was paying attention, I began to be more subtle and flexible.

  “Honey, I want to talk to you about managing our finances. Is this a good time?”

  “No, not right now.”

  “Okay, no problem.” I wouldn’t take it personally; I wouldn’t try to push. I knew it wasn’t about me. I began to move at a pace that was comfortable to her and prayed through the rest of it.

  The more I paid attention, the more I also realized that Angela wasn’t always ignoring me when she didn’t follow up on things I asked her to. I figured out that she gets overwhelmed when she’s presented with too much information. When that happens she’s likely to put things off. Before I realized this, her delays and indecision had been making me feel crazy. When it came to our family finances and business decisions, instead of overwhelming her with information, I started researching our options and presenting them to her in a positive and encouraging way. I’d show her what I’d learned, explain what our options were and what decision I thought was best and why. Then I’d answer all her questions, and we’d pray for God to help us make a good decision. Sometimes she liked my ideas, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she’d answer things when I wanted, sometimes she didn’t. I had to accept that. At least she would go through her process and eventually get back to me. I didn’t feel dismissed or ignored.