Death… It's A Living

A few days ago, I asked my wife if she was looking forward to our trip to Italy. And even though she will be at work starting at 3:00 pm most days to align her digital nomadic schedule with the west coast of North America, and even when she’s not at work she’ll be at my mercy as I drag her to potential locations for an academic class, I already knew the answer. I wasn’t really asking, it was just my way of telling her that I am looking forward to traveling. She said yes of course, but also something more interesting.

It will be good practice for our marriage.

We’ve been married for over 18 years and close friends for another 6 years before that. I’ve known her for more than half my life, and we’ve lived together as a couple under the same roof longer than either of us lived with our families of origin. We’re an old married couple, and we shouldn’t really need much practice.

But marriage is a funny thing. It’s both the beginning and the end of something. And it’s not just the end of being single, it is the end of many a story. Western children are brought up with tales in which the happy prince and princess find each other, marry, and live happily ever after. Marriage is literally the end of the story. Most people hope to be married (and I use “marriage” liberally to mean any committed domestic partnership) for the rest of their lives. Although age at first marriage has increased fairly significantly over the last 3-4 generations, it remains younger than 30 in the US (though men marry at roughly 30 and a half years). Our stories end before the second act of a three-act play has begun.

Marriage Vitality

The research on marriage vitality (that is, whether or not both partners feel happy and satisfied into middle age) shows that the key is adaptation to change. If one is going to try to stay with the same person for as long as my wife and I have, or—God forbid—even longer, they have to be able to adapt. Most people who go into marriage are aware that they must make room in their lives for their partner, but fewer seem to be aware that this is not a one-time adjustment. Rather, this adjustment is ongoing and must continue for as long as the marriage can be expected to remain vital. There are several inflection points, and the most crucial involve the children. (Briefly, it should be noted that not all lifelong domestic partnerships need involve children. In fact, marriages are easier to maintain when they do not: Study after study has suggested that children, while often deeply loved and rarely regretted, stress and weaken marriage. Although this might sound controversial, and maybe even problematic to those of us with children, the science is quite clear in this area: Children make our lives harder, and often objectively worse.)

There are two points in a marriage that are, statistically speaking, danger zones in terms of the potential for divorce. The first is immediately after the children are born. Even my students who are the most shocked and horrified to hear me say that parents tend to be less happy than non-parents are unsurprised by this fact. Many nod as that is the time when their parents were divorced, having no memories of their parents living under the same roof. Having a baby is stressful, and stress causes all sorts of problems in a relationship. Happily, my wife and I made it through that those early days.

The second most common time for divorce is after the children leave. A friend and colleague once memorably told me not to underestimate the impact of dropping one’s child off at college.

It’s like, she’ll always be my daughter… but she’s never really going to be my kid again.

Parenting sometimes feels like a marathon in which the finish line is ensuring that the kids enough skills to be able to fend for themselves and then getting them the hell out. The stress of parenting often feels connected to the worry that one’s child is not picking up those skills fast enough. This stress is also exacerbated by books that claim to know what a 1-year-old or a 4-year-old should be able to do at that age. Although parents have a lifetime to teach and mentor their children, minors setbacks can feel like major failures. Both my wife and I had ridiculous fears about our oldest never learning to go to the bathroom on his own by the time he would be enrolling in college. (Thankfully, both of our teenage sons are fully housebroken. Though, if you ever visit my house, I’ll thank you not to enter their shared bathroom and judge my parenting skill by the odor.)

The Uncanny Repetition of an Empty Nest

What happens after one reaches that finish line? Happily ever after? Well, that would be the end of the story, but most of us parents don’t hope to die immediately after the children leave. In fact, I might live for 30, 40, or even 50 years more. The same is of course true for my partner.

So although I was struck by my wife’s phrasing, I knew what she meant. We’ve lived with each other for two decades, but do we really remember how to live with just each other? The boys attend an international charter school and they went on a school sponsored trip to southeast Asia a few months ago. It was the longest they had been out of the house in their lives. It was also the first time I’d been in the house with just the wife and the pets for over a decade. We mostly worked, but we were also able to do something we hadn’t done in ages: date. Chat and laugh and not worry about how we’d need to get home soon. In truth, mostly we talked about whether the boys would eat anything in Vietnam, whether our oldest would lose his retainer on a plane, or whether our youngest would pay any attention to the educational opportunity we had sacrificed multiple family vacations for. We were still parents, even without the children in the house.

That may be what we’ll always talk about years into the future. Then maybe we’ll only talk about their spouses and our grandchildren. But for our marriage, or any marriage, to remain vital, we’ll need to figure out a new way of being, even though the old way of being has worked really well.

They said that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I suppose that’s true in a world where everything can be expected to stay the same. But time changes everything. Sometimes the same action, over and over, is what causes a fracture. The vitality of a marriage is a dynamic quality that varies over time. My wife is right, our time in Italy will be good practice.

-The Plague Doctor