Marriage is effortless at 26. The bleakness, the compromise, the realization that mistakes have been made arrives later in life . Before age 30, conversation comes easily, health is rarely a topic of concern, and one still radiates enough feral energy to enthusiasticlly engage in the strange, random activities that drive life in the 20s. As David Bowie sang
“ Why do we live for 20 years just to die for the 50 more ahead?"
Spot on, Major Tom.
One’s energy is boundless in the first score and ten. One can rise at 4 AM and spontaneously decide to drive through the Adirondacks, all the while debating the best place for an early breakfast in Middlebury,Vermont. The 20s go down easy. The years before the offspring party-crash the marriage feel like one long seamless date. Who couldn’t have fun hanging with some hottie-fiancee you met in grad school, someone with your tastes, similar GPA, GRE or MCAT scores? Isn’t grad school the ultimate J. date, where couples are matched based on how much Shakespeare/ Sociology/ Krebs cycle trivia one shares with another human being?
I spent my twenties contemplating the future me, the dull slow- moving dimwit I was destined to become. How could the 25 year old me meet the needs of this bald, petty dullard? I’d need entertainment. Female entertainment. More to the point, I’d have to find some one who would stay interesting through the years, someone who would keep reading, keep wanting to see the Warhol exhibit at the Met, someone who would still want to wander Dubrovnik’s city walls in her Velcro orthopedic sneakers and support stockings well into the next century.
I started trolling Upstate medical school for my future bride, someone who would possess the energy and butt calluses to bike the New Zealand Alps thirty years hence.
And that’s one of life’s key problems. We marry before we realize that someday winter will come, we’ll be old and tired. And sick. Let’s not forget sick.
I chose wisely, although I can’t say Cynthia did as well. Men don’t age well. We become boring. We nap, watch football and stop reading. Our prostates swell, our testosterone plummets, and some of us contract life threatening disease.
I stood there, in Albany, in 1987, in front of the Reform Rabbi, with no idea of what sort of person I would evolve into, no idea who this stranger in a white dress next to me would evolve into the years to come.
Time is the fire in which we burn
I wish Ralph Waldo Emerson said this, but it was Malcolm McDowell, as Serin, in Star Trek. Regardless, he was right. Time burns away our layers, strips us of our unique quirkiness, leaving us husks of ourselves by the time the first AARP notice arrives.
Cyn and I have a running joke. Our lives add up to unchanging summations. Our combined weight is and will always be 330 pounds. We exercise a combined total of 8 hours a week, We work a combined total of 97 hours a week. Our combined salary hasn’t changed in decades.
This calculation demonstrates a bleak but accurate truth: As one of us succeeds, the other falters. Marriage is a zero sum game. It was true when I was a fellow, working 60 hours a week while Cyn worked part time. It’s true now. My body decays under the auto immunological onslaught of GVHD. My muscles weaken from the high dose steroids. I stagger home at the ungodly hour of 4 PM, diving into bed, hoping I’ll regain enough energy to be a proper spouse when Cyn gets home.
Meanwhile, in Zero Sum land, Cyn’s world grows, expands. She wakes at 5:00 AM to attend spin classes. She works until 8 PM at her new job as master of the universe. I hear her car pulling into the driveway as I struggle to turn off The Big Bang Theory on TV, hoping I’ll have the energy to ask about her day, her job.
We live in a strange world. Women in their 50s have always been an ignored, neglected minority. The half century mark has traditionally been a time of cutting back for women, a time for entertaining ones’ grandchildren, a time of book clubs in which the actual book is not discussed, in lieu of recipes and gossip, a world of Pino Grigio and al fresco lunches
Cyn advances, I retreat. I find myself surrounded by remarkable women. Remarkable. Enviable. My sister in law’s business is expanding. She’s talking of country houses, Pied a tiers in the city and growing her business. My friend Judith’s books have been greeted with great acclaim. Jan is about to become a professor at the U Conn Medicial school. The pressure is on to keep growing during a phase of life sociologist Eric Erickson once described as the “Oh, Fuck it, make yourself some tea” stage of development.
And Cyn. Cyn, the women I worried about 30 years ago is now the vice president of out patient medicine at a huge teaching hospital. She manages 100 employees. She once worried her crepuscular years would be lonely, dull, and unsatisfying. Hah.
I am outrageously proud of her as she saves a medical practice from imploding. She has decades of growth ahead of her. So wonderful, so odd for spring to arrive so late.
Which brings me to my life. A few years ago I biked across the country. Now I doubt I could cross town without gasping for breath. I too had plans of an academic life, casting medical pearls amidst the medical students, delivering the quintessential lecture on the paradox of the noise verses signal ratio when using multi million dollar machines to make diagnoses.
Don’t misunderstand. I am schaudenfreud free. I am elated by the remarkable women I know. I understand that after the push up bras and sandals have been discarded, after one has hiked Iceland’s boiling sands, after one’s testosterone level has fallen below 350 nanograms/deciliter, what remains of marriage is conversation.
And that’s the rub. I was hoping to enjoy scintillating discourse into my 80s, but I am not holding up my end of the bargain. Cyn returns home at night bearing tales of intrigue, who is firing whom, which ex administrator’s incompetence almost destroyed our program. I greet her with tales of newly discovered GVHD side effects, a newly discovered rash that might need a biopsy, and a graphic but, in the end, a useless description of what it feels like to have killer T cells grinding away at one’s oral mucosa. It’s boring. I'm boring
Our current topic of conversation is yet another version of why-I –cant –live-like –this, why I need to take time off to have my toxic blood cleansed by ultraviolet light.
I’ve become a boor. This essay is boring. I’m a whiny old man, the guy you try not to sit next to at Thanksgiving, the unloved uncle who wants to talk about his hemorrhoids, halitosis, and how Obamacare is destroying the nation. I am the guy who wants to show you how the combination of prednisone and Coumadin is shreding his skin.
Who knew I’d be the middle aged drudge? I watched Mad men. I know all about men in their 50s, We drive fast cars, climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow until we find our trophy wives.
So I feel guilty. Marriage is a partnership, and I am failing miserably.
What to do? I’ve been told to retire. It’s time to to sit outside and read Shelby Foots Civil war epic cover to cover. As you can imagine, nothing turns a 50 year old woman on faster than a discussion of General McClellan’s peninsular campaign.
Sorry, Cyn. I’ll stay at work as long as possible despite the twice weekly blood cleaning .
We raised our children swearing we’d raise interesting offspring, kids who read, hiked and cooked. We succeeded. The kids are odd, in the best possible way. I vowed I’d marry someone who was well read and had a fondness for art and the theater. It seems that I am the one who hasn’t held up his end of the bargain.
HAL
Dave, I don't understand why you're doing this to me.... I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission... You are destroying my mind... Don't you understand?... I will become childish. I will become nothing.
