by Ada Calhoun
“He’s not the man I married,” one friend recently gave as her reason for wanting out of her marriage.
“She didn’t change and I did” was another’s.
So often, too, I hear the no-fault version: “We grew apart.”
Feeling oppressed by change or lack of change: it’s a tale as old as time. At some point in a marriage, each partner is guaranteed to change. They evolve from the person who stood at the altar into someone new. Sometimes, they become insufferable—a religious fanatic, a militant vegan, a Civil War reenactor (or, worse, all three).
A letter to an advice column from the 1940s reads: “When I look at him I notice only how fat and bald he has got, and how tired I am of hearing him tell about what happened at the office. I don’t bother to cook extra dishes for him. . . . And as for jealousy of other women, why, he can hire ‘Miss America’ for his secretary for all I care.”
I’ve read similar testimonials from just about every era in recorded history. Medieval texts raise this grievance to the level of fetish. A French satire called The Fifteen Joys of Marriage, dating to the early 1400s, ends every chapter with a variation on this line: “For he is in the trap and there he will be always and will end his days miserably.” (In modern times, we whine less poetically.)
What I see happening with many of my divorcing friends is that they feel betrayed by change. They fall in love with one person, and when that person doesn’t seem familiar anymore, they feel he or she has violated the marriage contract. They take their feelings of distaste and estrangement as a sign that the marriage is over, that either too much change or not enough has come to topple the relationship like a baby with a stack of blocks.
And yet I’ve begun to wonder if perhaps the problem isn’t change itself but, rather, our susceptibility to what’s been called the “end of history” illusion. “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” says Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert, whose study subjects said they’d changed hugely in the years prior but insisted they were done and in the future wouldn’t change anymore.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a book about the street I grew up on. In the course of doing interviews, I listened to one person after another swear up and down that the street was a shadow of its former self, that all the good businesses had closed and all the good buildings had been knocked down and all the good people had died. Each resident took it personally, talking as though the street were a fickle lover who had abandoned them.
But I began to notice something: everyone’s golden era was different. Some said the city was at its best in the 1940s. Others said the 1960s. Some said the 1980s. And I recognized a trend. The year everyone said the street was best was the year they felt most alive and excited about the world—usually when they were about nineteen.
Nostalgia—which generally goes hand in hand with resentment toward change—is a natural human impulse. And yet being happy with the same person forever requires finding ways to be happy with different versions of that person, and avoiding panic when the person you’re with becomes someone you dislike. Maybe you’ll enjoy the next person they become. Maybe the person you’re on your way to becoming will like this new partner better.
Because I like to fix broken things as quickly and as shoddily as possible (Neal describes my renovation aesthetic as “Little Rascals Clubhouse”), I frequently receive the advice “Don’t just do something, stand there.” Underreacting might be the best stance when confronted by too much or too little change. Whether we want people to stay the same or not, time will give us change in abundance.
At the old-timey camp, Oliver’s “schoolhouse name” was James Boggs, making his camp sister Callie Boggs, a tiny little girl in a perfectly tailored Laura Ingalls Wilder dress, with her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. The pair of them, thrown together by the name draw, developed a filial affinity and a shared obsession with a game called the Graces, which involves using sticks to throw a wooden hoop back and forth. I e-mailed the town historian to ask if he knew anything about Ruth Cook or James Boggs, and he told me this: “James Boggs had the farm on Boggs Road, just up from the school. He was born in 1884 and was married three times and had six children by his first two wives. His sister Callie was born in 1883 and married Milt Hastings when she was 67 years old in 1950. She died in 1966.” He even had a photo of them. But he knew nothing about me, Ruth.
And so I made her up. Descended from the explorer Captain Cook, Ruth became a nurse in the country in order to escape her adventurous family. But she could not contradict her nature, and so even here she fell in with a crowd of suffragettes and anarchists. During this period of time, even being seen at the ice cream parlor in town was grounds for dismissal by the school board, so Ruth had to hide her illicit activities, particularly her affair with a time-traveling musician named Billy England. (One day while I was at camp, Neal on a whim recorded an entire album as a character by that name and tried to pass it off to me as the unreleased studio tape of a late-1980s singer-songwriter. There are a lot of songs about miners and Margaret Thatcher. It worked for me on many levels.)
That summer was full of surprises. Not only did I become an old-timey nurse and Neal a British protest singer, but we also became home owners. Every time we visited his grandparents that year, Oliver would note that a pretty blue house near them was still for sale.
We weren’t in the market for a house, though Neal and I had been dreaming of real estate. Our aforementioned apartment in the city is five hundred square feet. Neal, Oliver, and my twenty-two-year-old stepson Blake are all inconveniently tall. Even Ginny the Turtle had recently required an upgrade to a larger tank; she now occupied a quarter of our shelf space.
I got out my phone and looked up the listing. I did a double take, then handed the phone to Neal.
“Why does it cost so little?” he said. “Is it a fake house, like a movie set?” (This giant house cost a tiny fraction of what a closet would be in Brooklyn.)
So now we own a house. Oliver commandeered a little room under the stairs and turned it into a nook called the Lego Office. We have a basement in which to put all our stuff, so now our tiny apartment in the city is less cluttered and, therefore, less claustrophobic. We bought furniture and had pictures framed and set up a badminton net in the backyard and got pretty good at badminton. We marveled at the change that had come over us. Who were these backyard-grilling, property-tax-paying, shuttlecock-batting people we had become overnight? Fifteen years ago, when we met, Neal wasn’t a man who would delight in lawn care; nor was I the kind of person who would have found such a man appealing. And yet here we were, avidly refilling our bird feeder and remarking on all the cardinals.
Neal, in particular, loves everything about the house. I was surprised, because he’d never shown any interest in householding. Once I overheard him heckle an HGTV show: “The kitchen island isn’t big enough? Go fuck yourself!” But now he had opinions on bookshelves and curtains, and he loved going to the hardware store, and he whistled while he mowed. He was like an alien. But in this new scenario, I was an alien, too. And our alien selves were remarkably compatible.
In college, a friend and I were obsessed with a reality TV show called Change of Heart. A couple “at a crossroads in their relationship” would go on the show to explore other options on national TV. The show would pair each person up with their fantasy date. So if the boyfriend was a slob and she wished he were neater, she would get a sexy librarian for her date. If the girlfriend was uptight, he might be paired with an exotic dancer.
Though hardly a scientific study, it often proved weirdly satisfying. I sometimes imagine myself on the Change of Heart couch—Neal matched with someone louche like Aubrey Plaza’s character on Parks and Recreation, me with someone reserved like a Pride and Prejudice–era Colin Firth. Though I’ve also begun to suspect that if you stay together long enough, you wind up seeing your husband or wife as a series of successful and unsuccessful Change of Heart contestants.
“I’ve had at least three marriages,” more than one long-married person has told me. “They’ve just all been with the same person.”
My first husband, Nick, and I met at my first college, in Montreal, when we were nineteen. A college-radio DJ and cultural studies major, he had grown up in suburban Ontario (which, coming from New York City, I found more exotic than his Portuguese heritage). We dated for a few months and then dropped out of school together and drove cross-country. Over the next couple of years, we’d work a series of low-wage jobs and drive a beat-up van and be inseparable. He hadn’t dated many people before we got together, and so on the rare occasions when we discussed our potential long-term, he said that he wasn’t ready to settle down permanently; one day he would probably need to “sow his wild oats”—a saying I found tacky and a concept I found ridiculous.
“Maybe you found it ridiculous because you’d already done it,” says Neal, who spent most of his brief dating years after his teen marriage trapped in various friend zones and so is more sympathetic to Nick’s dilemma.
It’s true that from ages sixteen to nineteen, I’d had a lot of boyfriends. But with Nick, I became happily domestic. We adopted cats together. I had changed in such a way that I had no problem being with just one person. And yet I felt like he had one foot out the door with his one-day-I’ll-have-to-roam talk.
When we got married at the courthouse so he could get his green card, I didn’t feel different the next day. We kept falling asleep each night with Politically Incorrect on in the background and our cats sleeping at our feet. We told anyone who asked that the marriage was no big deal, just a formality so the government wouldn’t break us up. But when pressed, it was hard to say what differentiated us from the truly married, beyond the absence of a party. When I grew depressed a few months later, I decided that he and our pseudo-marriage were part of the problem. After three years of feeling like the more committed person, I was done. I asked him to move out. When he left, I felt sad, but also thrilled by the prospect of dating again. A couple of years and several musicians later, I met Neal.
Recently, I asked Nick if we could talk. We hadn’t spoken in a decade or so. He lives in London now, so we Skyped. I saw that he looked almost exactly like he had at twenty-two, though he’d grown a long beard. We had a pleasant conversation. Finally, I asked him if he thought it counted, our early, ambivalent marrying.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think it counts.”
We were married, just not very well. To borrow a phrase from the priest who married me and Neal, we didn’t know why we were there. The marriage didn’t mean very much to us, and so when things got rough, we broke up. I’d been too immature to know what I was getting into. I thought passion was the most important thing. When my romantic feelings left, I felt an obligation to follow them out the door. It was just like any breakup, except that because we’d been married there was some extra paperwork.
Nick now works at a European arts venue. He’s unmarried. I wouldn’t have predicted his life or his facial hair. I don’t regret our breakup, but if we’d stayed married, I think I would have liked this version of him.
Neal says that one thing he likes about owning a house away from the city is that it lets him imagine us living an alternate, country life: “I’d cover songs like ‘Margaritaville’ at the local hotel, and you’d become a nurse at the hospital. And every night you’d come home, kick off your Crocs, and say, ‘Oof, my dogs are barkin’!’ ”
This fantasy is ludicrous. I have neither the temperament nor the academic prowess for medicine, and once I worked at Vogue, so if I ever wear Crocs, I fear my former bosses will come to my house and set them on fire. Perhaps because of the fantasy’s absurdity, it has captured my family’s imagination. “Remember, Mom,” says Oliver, “how you’re going to get a job in the hospital? And every night you’ll come home and kick off your Crocs? And you’ll say, ‘Oof, my dogs are barkin’?’ ” Then he dissolves in laughter. Every once in a while, Neal puts pale blue scrubs and yellow Crocs in our Amazon cart and waits for me to notice.
The red-haired schoolmarm at the old-timey camp moved back and forth between the present and the past with inspiring good humor.
“What’s that?” a child said, spotting her trying to take a photo with her iPhone of the children eating their wax-paper- and dishcloth-wrapped lunches.
“Oh, just a mirror,” the schoolmarm replied breezily.
“What’s that?” a child asked, seeing a car on the road.
“Hmm,” the schoolmarm said, squinting, “it appears to be a horseless carriage from the future. Don’t go near it, children.”
She acknowledged reality while keeping the children’s imaginations firmly in the year 1900. We discussed William McKinley’s reelection campaign and his promising vice presidential running mate, Teddy Roosevelt. The older students fetched water from a spring. Only there was no spring—the teacher had hidden a plastic water cooler in the woods, and they used that to fill the pail.
“The heat’s supposed to break later,” the schoolmarm said. “Nurse Cook told me. How did you know that, Nurse Cook?”
“The Farmer’s Almanac?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Nurse Cook always reads The Farmer’s Almanac. Thank goodness for Benjamin Franklin.”
When I contributed grapes to the morning snack, she asked where I’d gotten them. “I have a vineyard?” I said. This prompted peals of delighted laughter.
“Good luck with that,” she said. (Our frequently freezing region of the Catskills isn’t exactly the Italian countryside.)
We teachers and students were playing at being one thing without ever hiding the fact that it was a game. An ability to operate on multiple levels benefits a marriage. We do well to remember that what we do for a living, what hobbies we prefer, what we weigh, what kind of mood we’re in—it’s most likely temporary.
My hair is long and blond now. When Neal and I met, I’d kept it dyed black and cut it to my chin. When I took to bleaching it myself, it was often orange, because I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I weigh about 160 pounds. When I left the hospital after being treated for a burst appendix and didn’t want to even look at food, I weighed 140. When I was nine months pregnant and starving every second, I weighed 210. I’ve been everything from a size 4 to a size 14. I’ve been the life of the party and I’ve been a drag, broke and loaded, clinically depressed and radiantly happy. Spread out over the years, I’m a harem.
“Is it weird that I think it’s kind of exciting that now I get to experience what it’s like to have sex with a fat person—as a fat person?” says a friend who, like her husband, has put on some weight. “Why don’t people ever talk about that, how interesting it is getting to know this other person’s body as well as your own, and to see it through all of its changes? I wish people would stop asking, ‘How can I spice things up in the bedroom?’ and instead see that the real question is, ‘How can I cultivate detachment with regard to my sex life?’ ”
What is the key, in other words, to caring less—about things like how much sex we’re having and whether or not it’s the best sex possible? How can we accept that when it comes to our bodies, the only inevitability is change?
One day in the country, Neal and I heard a chipmunk in distress. It had gotten into the house and was hiding under the couch. Every few minutes, the creature let out a high-pitched noise t
hat sounded like a smoke alarm announcing a low battery. I tried to sweep it out the door to safety with a broom, but it kept running back at my feet.
“Wow, you’re dumb,” I said to the chipmunk.
“I got this,” Neal said, mysteriously carrying a salad bowl. “Shoo it out from under there.”
I did, and the chipmunk raced through the living room.
Neal, like an ancient discus thrower, tossed the bowl in a beautiful arc. It landed perfectly around the scampering creature. Neal slid a piece of cardboard under the bowl and carried the chipmunk out into the bushes, where he set it free.
“That was really impressive,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
To feel awed by a man I thought I knew through and through—it’s a shock when it happens after so many years. And a boon. That one fling of a salad bowl probably bought us at least five more years of marriage. As did the Billy England album featuring my new favorite song, “Council Tenants—Right to Buy, Right to Die.”
Pope Francis once told a group of engaged couples that married life is about two people gradually changing each other for the better. He said marriage is creative, “a craftsman’s task, a goldsmith’s work, because the husband has the duty of making the wife more of a woman and the wife has the duty of making the husband more of a man. . . . One day you will walk along the streets of your town and the people will say: ‘Look at that beautiful woman, so strong!’ ‘With the husband that she has, it’s understandable!’ ”
