Is Staying in Love a Choice?
We all know it's easy to fall in love, but Alex Kuczynski argues that keeping the romance should be too.
I'll never forget learning the difference between a successful long-term marriage and a failed one. I was in a hair salon on Madison Avenue a week before my wedding, and the woman next to me getting highlights offered her advice. I knew her nephew, and she thought this was enough of a connection to be candid. "Don't let it become like mine," she said, sounding flatly unimpressed with herself. "It's been 10 years, and we've had our children. Now we live in the same house and sleep in the same bed, but it's not really a marriage." She stopped and peered at me from under a Sydney Opera House of tinfoils. "Don't become brother and sister. Make a choice to be something else."
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Now that my husband and I have been together for 10 years, married more than eight, from time to time I pause to reflect on what that woman said. There is so much literature about making marriages work, and so much conversation about how much work it takes to have a good marriage, that it's hard to believe anyone has a good marriage anymore. Instead, it sounds like we all have second jobs.
You never see happy marriages on television, of course. Satisfied, calm marriages don't make for high ratings or good gossip. Most celebrities discuss how hard they work at their marriages; discussing an easy one doesn't sell magazines. No one writes about his or her good marriage. Yawn. Memoirs sell off the wreckage of people's lives, not the pleasant successes. Wreckage gets you on Oprah.
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But the notion that we ought to choose to remain in love doesn't wash with me anymore. Love is a commitment, but the idea of choosing to work at your marriage sounds like a drag. I'm going to write something that might irritate people, but here we go: Sometimes you luck out. Sometimes being married is easy. Sometimes--strike up the violins and cue the Hugh Grant voice-over--love chooses you.
Frankly, it should be easy. It should be a joy almost every day to be married, to feel relief and gratitude, and if it isn't, you're in the wrong marriage. The secret to a happy marriage isn't hard work, as if we should behave like dogs gnawing over the bones of a relationship until we discover marrow. It's not convincing yourself that every good marriage takes work and hauling yourselves to therapy twice a week until the wheels come off. The secret to a happy marriage is finding the right person and remaining faithful. Call me a boorish American bourgeois (and all my unhappily married friends in Europe will), but that's pretty much it.
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Beyond that, the ideal is to fall in love, then--surprise--to fall further in love each passing year, from the first phase of romantic love (which can last up to three years, say psychologists) to the attachment phase of love, the long, forever period when you either remain attached or become detached, like the woman under the tinfoil who felt like she was sleeping with her brother.
I'm bored with people who tick off with a dreary consistency all the noble tasks they do to make their marriage work, as if they should be congratulated for accepting the connubial call to arms. A few years ago, a friend told me she bought a Roomba as a relationship solver because neither she nor her husband could be bothered to vacuum the kitchen. I watched the dark little disk wander the linoleum floor until it stalled in a corner, and I thought to myself, "This relationship is doomed. These people don't even like each other enough to make their apartment presentable to each other. That's not hard work; that's basic respect." Two years later, they were divorced.
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Imagine that your spouse might disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow. For so many people--think of people in combat, war correspondents, police officers, emergency responders--that's a terrifying, potentially sudden reality.
If that thought doesn't cause enough panic and heartbreak and sorrow to overwhelm you, you're in the wrong place with the wrong person.
As for the woman under the tinfoil, I e-mailed her nephew the other day. She made a choice. She's still married.
-By Alex Kuczynski
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Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.
