Meredith Lee and I will mark 32 years of marriage in a few days, June 30th to be exactamundo. 32 years, that’s a lotta years. How do you stay married for that long? Beats me. I’m serious, I don’t know. I’ve never read a “marriage” book cover to cover. I think I started Love & Respect (for some reason) but petered out after a few pages. It felt too clean, too formulaic, too straightjackety. My favorite book about marriage is Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. It’s top-drawer fiction, and therefore true.
I wasn’t sure last year if we’d see 32 years together. You see my Dad died last year. And in the wake of that heartbreak, we made the decision to move from Colorado back to Arkansas, back closer to family. We had lived in Colorado 18 beautiful years. We moved back into my Mom’s spare room, plus spent a few chunks of time in my sister-in-law’s spare room. We were grateful to have a room, but it was horrible. And while Meredith Lee was trying to help us keep life on the rails, I was lost in grief. If you’ve ever been lost in grief, you know what I’m talking about. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel much of anything either and I live by feel so we were in trouble. Last year I failed Meredith Lee more times than I count. Some failures were small, fixable. Others were breaches in trust. Trust is a hard fence to mend. Yeah, you can retweet that. But that’s how I felt last year—I was constantly “riding fence,” day after day hoping at some point I’d get to the end, be finished. But each morning was nothing but more horizon, and more busted fence.
And then we got to that point. If you’ve ever gotten to that point then you know what I’m talking about. She got there first, I fumbled in behind. The point being neither one of us much cared to be married anymore. She believed she’d be better off by herself, and I agreed. My God those are sad sentences to type. But they’re honest. Do you know that song by Alabama, “Lady Down on Love”? Some of those lyrics fit us at that point, mainly the line—and she just couldn’t live with a man she couldn’t trust.
If your enquiring mind wonders if I had an affair with some perky 25yr old rodeo queen, no, I didn’t. But I did let my wife down. And I let my kids down. Hell, I let me down. Am I being hard on myself? If honest is hard (and it usually is), then yes, yes I am. Our culture’s in a “Aw, c’mon, go easy on yourself, pal” sorta mindset right now, and while there are seasons for that, my take is that change occurs when we’re honest. And honest is almost always hard, that’s why most of us avoid it.
We hail-mary-ed, did a little marital counseling. Was it helpful? Maybe, I guess. In some way simply going to the counselor’s office was as beneficial as anything that happened once we were there. Counselors might disagree with me, but that’s what I think. Having something on the calendar that said—“We’re trying to make this work. And we’re going to try at it again two weeks from now”—yes, that helped. We also got out of the spare rooms, rented a condo in another town while we looked for a house. Small steps? Sure. Expensive steps? Yeah. But steps are steps, and they imposed some sort of order on our chaos.
I could Paul Harvey you here, jump to a “the rest of the story,” tell you how everything’s hollyhocks now, that we’re praying together, having sex every afternoon, writing a marriage book together, raising chickens, stuff like that. But that’d be dishonest. Are things better? Yes. Do we still have work to do? Yes. Do I? Lord yes. And will we celebrate 32 years of marriage this week? Yes, but it will be gratitude for wanting to stay married as much as anything, of not wanting to simply survive, but of wanting, even hoping for something more, something, well, I’ll give Stegner the last word here.
I hope they have done more than survive. I hope they have found ways to impose some sort of order on their chaos. I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don’t want it ended…
Crossing to Safety is one of my favorite books.
“How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?”
"God's honest truth" is a phrase that comes to mind when I read your words. We are a few years ahead of you two on the marriage timeline, but there have been a few years we marked an anniversary heaving a heavy sigh with the realization we simply made it one more day. Those one more days add up though. Happy Anniversary for each new day.