The Business of Love

Going Solo: Part 1

writer as a young wife

            Once I wrote a poem about marriage to be read at a wedding—an old occasion, a familiar form: the epithalamion, it’s called. The idea, I guess, is that someone reads a poem, imparts a blessing, says the magic words, sends the newlyweds off armed with whatever you’re supposed to need for a marriage, instructions for withstanding the fickle whims of fate, accepting your lot, stolidly putting up with someone else’s shit come hell or high water, getting along with and/or tolerating each other for the rest of your fucking life, anyway, one of my favorites, which no one agrees with me in thinking is the best possible poem you could read at a wedding, is William Carlos Williams' "The Ivy Crown:"

Romance has no part in it. 
The business of love is 
cruelty which, by our wills, 
we transform 
to live together.

            By god I am no William Carlos Williams, but a childhood friend asked me to be in her wedding and tasked me with writing a poem for the occasion. We weren’t close, hadn’t seen each other in ages, but according to whatever weird calculation of duty, nostalgia, and favor and power was involved, I wound up at some goddamn bridal shop, being fitted for a bridesmaid’s dress and matching low-heeled shoes in a pleasantly demure navy blue. As I stood there in my socks and slutty thong in the overheated dressing room, pulling a heap of navy blue poly-blend sateen over my head and swimming around in it searching for armholes, I wondered whether there had been—and I’m certain there had been—some discussion, perhaps between the other bridesmaids and the bride-to-be, or the bride and her mother, or the bride’s mother, who lost her virginity to the bride’s father, and the bride’s father, who I’d always found a tiny bit sexy and/or overmuch interested in—when we were teenage girls—the social mores, fashion concerns, and deep inner lives of teenage girls—of what, exactly, my role in this wedding was to be. Whether and exactly how to distinguish me from the other bridesmaids, all still unmarried, without using the title “matron of honor,” which was also incorrect, since I was no longer a matron, honorable or otherwise, given my recent divorce.

            In any case, the poem—which was more or less ok, as poems go—was both an epithalamion and a villanelle. I don’t remember the title, exactly—marriage something, something marriage.

            It began and ended with this line: “It doesn’t work.”

On the eve of my mother's 70th birthday, which she and I spent eating chocolate croissants, drinking coffee, and bingeing off- and off-off-Broadway plays in New York, as we lay chatting in side-by-side hotel room beds, I grinned and said, "Mom. Do you know how many men we've married between us?"

            She turned her head on the pillow and looked at me, aghast.

            "Six!" I crowed. "We've married six men!"

            She pulled the covers over her head and lay giggling, buried under the voluminous floof of the hotel duvet.

            Of course, that's nothing; we didn't count my dad's equally prolific marital career. My nuclear family of origin—three (3) people, all told—has run through a total of nine spouses. If you add my half-brothers, it gets even better. When she met the woman soon to become my brother's second wife, my mother made an earnest attempt to draw the family tree on the paper tablecloth with crayons, succeeding only in roughly replicating Fibonacci’s knot before tossing the crayon away irritably and saying, "Oh, never mind." Twenty years later, at a sprawling family holiday dinner, my sweet, shy niece tried to explain to her new boyfriend who I was—her aunt—but got tangled up when she ventured into the weeds of why I'm white and she is not, nor is her dad, whose first dad is my dad, and I am his daughter from his second marriage, and therefore her aunt—while, across the crowded room on this enchanted evening, I overheard my mom's third husband explaining to his son from his first marriage that the handsome man in the corner was his second wife's second husband's son from his first marriage, which is to say, the aforementioned niece’s father, my brother Tim.

            My generation may have been the last era of girls who almost universally assumed—were told, and largely accepted as the truth—that we'd get married, or at least that we should, but above all that we should want to. Unmarried women were weighted down, then as now, with assumptions and mythologies—lesbians, spinsters, mad-attic aunts. To actively choose not to marry would have seemed insane. Even the great many women of my generation who quickly realized we were some varietal of queer—emboldened by the surge of openly lesbian musicians, campy pop icons, and soon, a brilliantly monetized co-opting of queer culture, cleaned up and adapted for wholesale public consumption—wanted to get married; I fought long and loud for same-sex marital rights at the state and federal level, because if my queer friends wanted the romantic financial disaster that the institution of marriage affords, by god, they should be able to have it. Many did; many still do.

            Not only marriage but romantic and intimate partnership, being a part of a couple, is still held up as the ultimate purpose, the highest happiness one can achieve, the thing for which all else can and should be sacrificed. This is hardly an American invention, but the Disney version of love is a particularly monstrous creature, a fairy tale run amok: love gives rise to marriage and marriage comes in a package with a princess wedding dress, no end of magical thinking, and great surplus of obscure little rules. When I got married the first time, my mother made the most glorious dress—women’s work, one might say—of silk satin, off-white, bone white, because given everything, (darling), pure white wouldn't do. Would it have done by the time I was married, divorced, married again, and, due to a serious mismatch of absolutely everything about myself and my then-husband, openly having an entirely separate relationship with a bookish, boyish, brainiac girl? Or would it at least have explained why that girl and I sat glued to the TV each week, watching a double-header of "Million Dollar Weddings" and "Say Yes to the Dress"?

            Fast-forward through the end of the relationship with the brainiac girl, the end of the marriage, the start, full duration, and neat termination of the next marriage, the opening flare, rapid explosion, and eventual end of every fling and sub-fling and sub-sub-fling, to last summer, when, as an apparent exercise in insanity, I went to brunch with both a man I was seeing and his sweet young long-term partner, whom he insisted I needed to meet. I did my best to put this lovely Jane Eyre-loving large-eyed girl in her 20s, brown curls springing adorably from beneath a broad-brimmed hat, at ease; the quickest way to do that, of course, is to make jokes at my own expense, and in the course of said jesting, I mentioned a former spouse.

            "Oh," the girl sighed, lighting up. "You've been married?"

            "Yes," I said. "Thrice. Three times. Yes." I put on my sunglasses.

            She looked wistful. "I would like to do that one day," she said, playing with the delicate locket around her neck. "I feel like I should at least give it a try."

            "It's financial suicide," I said.

            Our mutual partner guffawed and picked up his coffee to hide his face.

            The girl sipped her oversized fresh mango mimosa and looked sadly off to the side. 

The year I went solo, I called my mother to report a marital snafu of such epic proportions I had gone sailing straight past grief and anger, soared over betrayal and shock, and arrived at a piercing, cheerful pitch of rage that's rare even for me, at which point I become so funny everybody better get the fuck out my way.

            She listened in stunned silence. Then she said grimly, "A woman's work is never done."           

            I was speechless. She doesn't think that. She can't think that, she has never thought that. My brilliant, beautiful, fierce, furious roman candle of a mother doesn't think anything of the sort. But the fact that she said it—the fact that it fell out of her mouth—may have been the real catalyst for this journey after all.

            I'll spend more time in upcoming posts on the reasons behind my decision to go solo as well as the reasons more and more people—especially women—are choosing to stay that way, but at some point I began to wonder what's going on in a culture with an absolutely unhinged fixation on finding, in an ever more disconnected world, some way—any way—to connect. I began to question everything I'd believed about relationships, from the primacy of romantic love to the desirability of monogamous sexual intimacy, asking who had the bright idea to idealize and build a massive, multi-billion dollar industry up around marriage, who cooked up the one-person-forever standard of relationships, and—more than anything else—who benefits from this idealization, and who bears the cost. 

            If I'm going to ask questions about culture, about other people, about the world, my first task is to examine the extent to which I participate in the systems and patterns I question, critique, or decry. So here goes: why did I buy in? Was it because the story of happily ever after was one I actually wanted to live out myself, or even believed that I could? Or was it because, at some level, I believed in the inherent value of that kind of life, a value that was, by definition, greater than the value of another kind of life—the kind toward which I kept tending, like a car out of alignment that kept drifting to one the side of the road?

            The kind of life toward which in fact I keep tending, present tense; a life of my own, guided by no compass other than my own.

            I wrote another poem about marriage, years ago—not an epithalamion, never read aloud, this one was written before my own wedding: not a blessing for a marriage so much as a spell. I recited it to myself almost as I wrote it; I recited it as I tried on the second-hand wedding dress at a ritzy little shop among other little ritzy shops in one of those ritzy towns where the presence of a second-hand store is almost embarrassing, a little ironic, as if to say as if—the women walking into it were older than I was, perhaps on their second marriage, as I was, and daring to wear a white wedding dress was a little tongue-in-cheek—and I recited it as I picked out the ironic vintage rhinestone choker and earrings and shoes to go with the ironically virginal dress. I recited the poem as we flew to New York to get married at City Hall on a Tuesday at 10 in the morning—we were slightly delayed, there was a bomb threat in the street, the driver sped through alleys and spun around corners and to get us, he sang, to the church on time—the Justice of the Peace had a thick Bronx accent and was terribly apologetic as she struggled to pronounce my name and I told her to skip it, and for years we joked we'd never actually gotten married at all—I carried the most beautiful bouquet of miniature cala lilies, flame-red and fuchsia and coral and a burgundy so dark it looked black (because, given everything, darling, white really wouldn’t do), our witnesses were my mother's third husband's son and his then-girlfriend, later wife, now ex-wife—the driver waited for us outside City Hall, and when we emerged, he popped in a karaoke tape, revealed he moonlighted as a nightclub singer, and sang us Frank Sinatra all the way uptown where we wanted to exchange our own vows on the steps of the New York Public Library, for reasons I no longer recall.

            I recited the poem all the way up the steps of the library, and I recited it all the way down. I recited it as the four of us laughed and ate an obscenely lavish meal at One if by Land, Two if by Sea. I recited it in the cab on the way back to the hotel, and in the hotel lobby as my husband asked the concierge to find him a cigar, and as we collapsed onto the satin couch in our suite and put our feet up at last. 

            My husband—who didn't smoke—loosened his cravat, took one or two grandiose puffs of the cigar, turned green, and tilted over onto his side. I stood by the window, looking out at the lights of the city, reciting the poem and smoking a very good Cuban cigar.

            I don't remember much of that poem either, only one recurring line: "I am lashing myself to it."

            The speaker of the poem seems to understand the nature of marriage, or at least of her own decision to enter into the covenant, the bond that marriage is. She knows something about romance, less about love; she knew, even the first time, that "romance has no part in it," and suspects that love may not have any part in it either, at least not love as she'd once thought of love. It is a system, a contract, a pact; there is an agreement, there are terms. It is a bond; it can be entered into, should not be entered into lightly; it can be broken, and the breakage will be serious and irrevocable and will create pain. Marriage is a thing, and it serves a purpose; she understood that its purpose was to contain something about her, or to contain her. It is a tether, attached to the ground; its purpose is to tether her, attach her to the ground.

            Now it’s coming back to me. The poem.

I am lashing myself to it/ tightly, with slipknots,/ by the left leg—

            It is a plumb line, it is a system of roots. It will create stability. It will hold me fast. It will keep me from drifting off. 

            For without it, I list—

            All the older people in my life, including my husband, seemed to have come to an agreement about me. This agreement involved murmurs, was concerned, and not a little stern. They agreed that marriage was good, was virtuous; they agreed that it would be good—necessary, even—for me. It would ground me; it would settle me down. I should have a husband. An older husband, ideally, and wiser, someone settled, solid, secure. A man who could settle me, ground me, take me in hand. Yes, and I should have a house; a physical place, attached to the ground, which would also ground me and settle me down. A box, in which I could be kept; a large box, heavy, built of heavy dark wood, decorated with beautiful things. A container, to keep me contained. A husband, and a house, and next a baby, which would ground me, get me back into my body; I would carry this baby, first in my body and then on it, it would be heavy and I would have to carry it everywhere, and this would make me feel grounded, and settled, and settle me down.

            And I believed them. There were so many of them, and only one of me, and they were so sure they were right, and it seemed impossible that all of them were wrong and only I was right, so I made myself believe it was true. I made myself believe I needed what they said I needed, I wanted what they said I should want. It was a given, wasn't it? That there was value, was virtue, in settling and in being settled, in being given things they said were gifts and in understanding the value of those gifts, the value of their weight and mass, the enormous value of the burden of the gifts.

            At no point—not for years—did it occur to me to question the premise. To question the objective value of that life, or the givenness of its virtue, or the meaning with which that kind of life had been inscribed by someone else's hand.

            I am lashing myself to it.

             They circle me. They come bearing gifts. They set them down; the gifts pile up, begin to tower, begin to block the light.

            The delicate set of china; the wineglasses that sing; the set of knives so sharp you do not even feel it when you have been cut.

            The vases, the cushions, the antique settees.

            Bread maker, espresso maker, rice maker, sieve.

            Marble cutting board, marble mortar and pestle, marble countertop.

            You don't know this yet, but one day, years from now, during an argument, you will shove that marble countertop, a slab at least twice your size, and it will go flying, and hit the floor with a deafening crash and shake the house, and you and the husband will stare at each other in a sudden split-second awareness of something that neither of you could or would explain, and the fight will be over and you will never speak of it again.

            Curtains with tassels; blue brocade bedspreads; fitted cornices in beige. Linens from Lisbon, so fine they have to be ironed three times.

            A five-bedroom house is lifted onto the pile, a swing set already in the backyard.

            They heave up the ten-ton husband; the whole thing groans and teeters for a moment, then rights itself like a ship.

            I am settled. I am grounded, I am contained.

            Beneath it all, under their watch, I have turned belly-down and, with all four paws, begun to dig.