by David Finch
She didn’t have to ask me every five seconds if I was okay or if anything was bothering me. She didn’t have to manage me. Instead, we were dancing! In an aquarium, no less! At one point, a stingray floated by and I said, “Oh, there’s that stingray I wanted to introduce you to. Friend of the bride, total history buff.” Kristen wrapped my tie around her fingers, saying, “Look at you, party animal!”
Then, through eyes tired and sparkling with champagne, she asked me a great question.
“So, are you actually having fun tonight? Or is this just an act? Are you just playing a character right now?”
“No,” I told her over the music, “I’m actually having a good time. I don’t want you to be married to a character, I want you to be in love with the real deal.” And I meant it. I was having fun! I didn’t feel lonely, and she didn’t feel trapped. I wasn’t worried about my performance—hadn’t even given it a second thought. I told her in general terms about my epiphany in line for cocktails earlier in the evening—that I can do my own thing—but I decided not to let her in on the fact that I was hell-bent on not being clingy or depressing. Doing so would have ruined my experiment.
Admittedly, standing around in an aquarium, eating bacon-wrapped sausages and talking to complete strangers about how they all know one another, wouldn’t have been my first choice. It probably never will be. But Kristen had fun, and watching her made the evening a better time than I could have imagined.
Then I thought, Why stop at parties? Why not be fun everywhere?
The third day of our trip presented us with some minor challenges—little tests of character to see if the daily seeding of being great company was actually starting to take root. Bring it.
It was pouring down rain, for starters, my wet T-shirt no less a constant reminder of that fact than the slow, percussive rhythm of rainwater crashing to the wet Berber carpet in pea-sized droplets: bloink . . . bloink . . . bloink. I was standing by an unoccupied reception desk in the smallest and most depressing office lobby I’d ever seen. My cheery floral-patterned swimming trunks and sandy flip-flops seemed ironic, as did my fresh suntan. Perhaps the setting was depressing because we were on vacation and I was wasting precious time standing around in a reception area, or maybe it was just because the walls were the color of a tobacco stain and there was no one—I mean no one—around to help me.
There was a silver bell on the deserted reception desk, and next to it a handwritten sign reading RING BELL FOR ASSISTANCE.
I did. No one came. Next I called out, “Hello?” No response. Thinking I must have the wrong office, I stepped outside to read the placard mounted beside the hollow, wobbly door. DENTAL SUPPLY SUITE 1A. This is it. I looked out into the parking lot, through the rain coming down in gray sheets, and put my hands up as if to signal to Kristen, I don’t know what the hell is going on in there. From inside the minivan, she shook her head and raised her hands, as if to ask me, What the hell is going on in there?
I went back inside—wondering why in God’s name I decided to have my wisdom teeth removed three weeks before a vacation—and made sure to slam the door shut. This got someone’s attention, apparently, because I heard a voice, some shuffling around, and finally, a short, bearded man emerged in a Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans.
“Hi,” he said with an inquisitive smile. “I’m Ed. Can I help you?” The good news was that he didn’t offer to shake my hand. The bad news was that it was because he was holding a dusty surgical mask in one hand and a white plaster mold of someone’s teeth and gums in the other.
“Yes,” I said. “Uhh . . . My wife and I are on vacation, and I just had my wisdom teeth taken out. I’m supposed to be using a special syringe to clean the holes out after meals, and I forgot it at home.”
“Oh,” he said, concerned. “Where’s home?”
“Illinois.”
“Oh my.”
“Anyway, I’ve been trying to find a fine-tip syringe here in town and haven’t had any luck. I saw your sign out front, and I’m hoping you might have something like that.”
“Oh, like a fine-tip syringe? Like, something you’d use after a tooth extraction, you mean?”
I flashed the broad, fake smile I typically reserved for business discussions, the one I’d rehearsed maybe a million times, the one I used to ingratiate myself to someone who could help me, but only if they wanted to. “Yeah, Ed. That’s exactly what I mean.”
He took a moment to scratch the back of his neck with the surgical mask (because, I suppose, using the teeth would have been bad form). “You know, I think I do have something. Give me a minute, I’ll be right back.”
He gestured toward the rumpled green sofa behind me—the one that he had clearly brought from home, or perhaps picked up on a curb somewhere along with a floor lamp, a broken microwave, and a sign reading FREE—suggesting that I take a load off.
“Fantastic!” I said, though I had no intention of sitting on Ed’s personal effects, no matter how friendly he seemed. I opened the front door and gave Kristen a big thumbs-up, and she laughed and rolled her eyes.
I was there because Kristen had caught me on the phone in the hotel room earlier in the morning, trying to get ahold of my oral surgeon. I thought Kristen was showering, but when she stepped out of the bathroom to grab her contact solution, she heard me ask in a near whisper if Dr. Bressman could advise on my situation. “See, I left my syringe at home . . .”
This seemed to have triggered a number of memories for her: our Door County vacation undermined by my fixation on avoiding West Nile virus; our Cape Cod vacation severely burdened by my obsession with the property’s outdoor shower; every family gathering since 2004 ruined by, well, you name it.
“I’ll call back,” I said, quickly hanging up. I wanted to think that I wouldn’t have turned the matter into a full-blown obsession capable of ruining day three, but Kristen wasn’t prepared to take any chances.
“Dave, if you’re still worried about dry sockets, we’ll just find a place that sells those syringes,” she said.
“But I don’t want to blow our vacation. I didn’t want it to be your problem.”
“It’s not going to blow our vacation. But if we don’t find one, then I want you to stop thinking about it. Deal?”
I agreed. Leaving the third pharmacy without a syringe at around ten A.M., I called the search off, and we headed for Folly Beach, which was about a half hour from our hotel in downtown Charleston.
We sat on the sand, watching people in the water splashing one another and getting stung by jellyfish, until a thunderstorm blew up, clearing everyone from the beach. Rather than heading back to the hotel, we decided to drive around for a while, and we got lost. Happily lost. “Turn down this street,” Kristen said. “I want to see those houses.” After dozens of random turns, we passed by this little office complex and the sign jumped out at us: DENTAL SUPPLY.
So there I was.
Twenty minutes passed with no more sign of Ed and I started going mental. Every now and then, I could hear pounding and the unsettling sound of hacksaw-against-plastic. Did this guy mean that he’ll find me a syringe . . . when he’s done doing whatever he’s doing with those teeth and gums? I don’t have time for this! I rang the bell, and he didn’t emerge. By that point, I figured Kristen would be massaging her temples with her fingertips, just barely keeping herself together, intensely regretting the fact that she was sitting in our minivan in a flooded parking lot in a downpour, married to a syndrome. I figured that my experiment was over. I figured that we were right back at square one, that my glory had been washed away.
I opened the office door and looked out into the rain. There she was, her head swaying back and forth as she sang along with some music. She spotted me, smiled, then lifted the iPod to her mouth, as if it were a microphone. Her singing gestures became more and more elaborate until she busted up laughing, and I thought, All is not yet lost.
Friendly Ed finally surfaced, marching almost, as though he had solved a great myste
ry.
“All right, he we are,” he said, handing me something that looked like a small NASA-designed turkey baster. “How’s that?”
It was a hand-cobbled syringe. Wow. I had been expecting something a little more hermetically sealed. A little less touched by human hands. But he seemed proud and handed it to me with a smile, so I took it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Wasn’t any trouble. Just had to use the tube from a larger syringe, and glue this other tip onto it, which meant I had to join them with this middle piece here. Careful you don’t tip it down until the glue dries.”
I asked him how much he wanted for it and he gently refused my offer to pay him. “Free of charge,” he said, opening the door for me.
I thanked him again and then dashed out to the car, eager to show Kristen my custom mouth squirter.
We decided to wait out the weather over lunch in a bar on Folly Beach. The clouds overhead were wispy and full and the color of dirty snow. But our veggie wraps were phenomenal and Kristen’s face was pure sunburned happiness. Beneath a high-definition television playing reruns of dirt bike races, we shared our favorite moments from the vacation, reliving them during the rain delay. She reached for my hands from across the table and said, grinning, “This is what I remember us being. This is how it used to be.”
Outside, the sun broke and the clouds rolled away, so we took our drinks to go, excited to see what fun was in store for us.
The Final Best Practice
Don’t make everything a Best Practice.
Three months after B.J.’s wedding, Kristen declared a moratorium on my Best Practices. The system, she told me, had gotten out of hand. Apparently, eighteen months of constant discussion about self-improvement had finally caught up with her and she couldn’t take it anymore.
Kristen didn’t have a problem with my sense of determination per se, but by the end of the summer it had become clear that the Journal of Best Practices was dominating our life. “It’s disrupting more than helping,” she told me. “It’s emotionally draining.”
It is? I wondered. I hadn’t noticed, but then, not surprisingly, I hadn’t considered things from her perspective. Perhaps it was draining to talk to her husband several times a day about his own behaviors and whether he was “likable enough.” Maybe it was disruptive to be woken up at night only to be informed of my latest plan to give her more closet space—a Best Practice I had intended to refer to as Donate all clothes not worn in twelve months, something I was convinced would make her think I was a truly remarkable husband.
Once she pointed it out to me, I could see that the scope of the Best Practices had expanded to include rather impertinent topics. Absurd even. By the time I mastered being fun at parties, which was not long after I began working on it, Kristen and I had addressed almost all of the underlying factors that had created problems in our marriage. With those core disciplines out of the way, I turned my attention to other, less critical things—things that amounted to minor annoyances. Don’t dawdle when mowing the lawn, for instance, was something to keep in mind if we had to go somewhere that day, but as a Best Practice it didn’t warrant the same amount of effort as Be present in moments with the kids. But I couldn’t make that distinction. I was on a roll and I didn’t want to slow the pace of transformation (see “obsessive tendencies”). I wanted to improve even more, even if it meant that my nightstand drawer—that central repository of paper scraps, Post-it notes, and journals—would collapse under the weight of my ambition. That’s where Kristen and I differed.
Had I kept the process to myself, it might not have been so bad, but I always insisted on her participation, even when she had other things to do. Which was all the time. As a working mom, Kristen’s days were packed. If she did have a few minutes to herself in the evenings, she would want to use that time to chill out, not to project slides against the wall to review my progress on such initiatives as keeping the refrigerator more organized and staying calm in the grocery store.
As with so many other things that are plainly obvious to most people, I had to be told that annoyances were to be expected and tolerated in any relationship, and especially in a marriage. Though I may not have realized that on my own, once it was explained to me, I understood exactly what it meant. Kristen put it this way: “You hog the blankets, Dave. You take months deciding which computer to buy. The instant we all pile into the car and shut the doors, you fart. That stuff is so annoying, and so not a problem.”
What was a problem, she explained, was beating myself up over every little thing and creating drama that nobody needed. After all, her expectation was that the Best Practices would eliminate all the drama. (Though I don’t know who she thought she was dealing with.) It was okay to aggravate her, but it wasn’t okay to drop what we were doing and formulate a Best Practice anytime I did, nor was it healthy to sacrifice otherwise happy moments for the sake of analyzing problems ad nauseam. It wasn’t okay to allow the Best Practices—the process of healing our relationship—to interfere with our relationship. If we did, then we’d be letting Asperger’s win.
“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “Even if I’m not flawless and I annoy you sometimes, you can still love me and be happy?”
“Yes! Exactly, Dave! That’s what love is. That’s what marriage is. That’s what we have! Isn’t that great news?”
It did sound like great news. So great that I could hardly process it. Ironically, I had to write a note in my journal reminding myself not to make everything a Best Practice. I knew that I was going to have to practice it. I envisioned myself frustrating Kristen in countless ways, and I could see myself laughing it off. Yes, I put the empty cereal box back in the pantry. Yes, she found it and now she seems irritated. No, I’m not on trial; no, she’s not keeping score. It really is no problem, just like she said, so let it go.
What I couldn’t have envisioned, however, was how much trust would be involved in allowing myself to let things go. It wasn’t easy. I assumed that, like me, Kristen made judgments against everything she saw and held grudges for decades. Although she had never given me any reason to feel this way, I had always assumed that if I was anything less than flawless, she would one day pack up her things and move on to greener pastures, perhaps finding herself a no-maintenance guy who loved grilling out with the neighbors and folding clothes. Being secure in who I am was going to take some getting used to.
I’d spend the next several months mastering the skill of being loved and accepted by Kristen. I had to remind myself numerous times every day that she wasn’t judging me, that she just wanted me to live my life without overthinking it. I made a pretty big deal about not making a big deal of things. The result? I no longer felt the grip of anxiety or the overwhelming sense that I was doing everything wrong. For the first time in almost ten years, I felt comfortable just going about my days. I felt reborn. Which was not a bad outcome, considering that a year and a half earlier, when our marriage was suffocating, I felt as though the entire burden of reconstruction was on my shoulders.
But a burden isn’t a bad thing. My desire to become a better husband and to earn back Kristen’s friendship helped us to achieve one of our primary objectives: I learned how to manage my behaviors and moods on my own. Kristen never set out to make me flawless, she just wanted me to be able to manage myself, and now I am able to do that.
That’s not to say that I don’t have to be careful. Far from it. Like anyone battling an affliction—be it addiction, hyperactivity, an eating disorder—I have to manage my behaviors every day if I want to be successful. If I don’t, I can find myself retreating behind old habits. I forget to go with the flow, I lose sight of other people’s perspectives, or I begin to absent myself from my family. Brooding, silence, resentment—it’s all there, waiting for me. Even in our second year of Best Practices, I made these mistakes, usually because I became distracted by either an unexpected argument or some random short-term fixation, like lifting weights or taking nature walks. I’l
l probably continue to slip from time to time. My brain wouldn’t have it any other way. But now when I slip, I don’t fall. I know how to keep myself up, and I know how to move on. Even if I were to fall, Kristen would be right there to help me up. Laughing, the way she does when I slip and fall on my ass, both literally and figuratively. That’s what marriage amounts to.
Enough about me, though. The morning the Best Practices were born (Pi Day, my fellow nerds), Kristen and I embarked on a mission with one objective in mind: to save our marriage. A worthy goal, if totally ambiguous. Save the Earth comes to mind: Oh yes, definitely. Which part? We didn’t know it, but the first year and a half of saving our marriage was really about understanding who we are, what our relationship actually is, and what we both need to do to make it work. Eighteen months, dozens of Best Practices, and innumerable hours of soul-searching later, Kristen and I finally reached this awareness. (I’m rather amazed we lasted five years without it.)
But we still weren’t there. Our marriage was better, no question, but it wasn’t exactly working. When Kristen curled up next to me in bed during our weekend in Chicago and told me, “You get me,” she was wrong. Or at least, wrong-ish. I didn’t get her, entirely. I understood who she was, how she behaved, what made her laugh. But I didn’t understand what she needed. For our marriage to work, I had to understand that.
With the final evolution of the process—Don’t make everything a Best Practice—after two years of lugging around notebooks, folding the frigging laundry, calling for performance reviews, and interviewing myself in the shower, I finally got Kristen. I understood what she needed from me: put the notebook down, love her, love the kids, and simply be—be myself so that she can love me back. That’s it. It seems unspeakably easy to me now, but perhaps I should consider that a testament to how far we have come since renewing our commitment to each other and to our relationship.
